In what ways is 'culture' similar for child and for chimpanzee? And just where do the differences in cultural capacities begin? These questions are critical to understanding the evolution of culture, in either species.
To answer them, I try to move ahead of arguments over which species simply do or do not 'have culture'. Instead, I suggest that these questions can be more richly tackled by first recognising several different ways in which human culture goes far beyond the the biologist's definition of cultures as socially transmitted traditions. For each of the nine contrasts between human cultures and animal traditions that I outline here, there is some evidence (strong in some cases, more debateable in others) suggesting that chimpanzees exhibit a certain intermediate status. Two main kinds of phenomena are discussed. First is cultural patterning at the population level, including (1) the range of cultural variants, (2) the cultural distinctiveness of different communities, (3) clustering of variations around core 'ideas' and (4) cumulation over time (the 'ratchet' effect). Moving on to mechanisms for the transmission of cultural knowledge I examine evidence for (5) teaching; (6) imitation and emulation of complex actions; (7) recognition of the imitative process; (8) behavioural convergence and convention; and (9) selective acquisition of meaningful information.
Both at the level of these mechanisms and the population processes they produce, similarities and differences in what is 'culture' to child and chimpanzee sharpen our picture of culture's ancient evolutionary foundations.

WHITEN, Andrew
Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution, and Scottish Primate Research Group,
School of Psychology, University of St Andrews
St Andrews, KY16 9JU, Scotland, UK
a.whiten@st-and.ac.uk