Young children spontaneously invent wild great apes’ tool-use behaviours

The variety and complexity of human-made tools are unique in the animal kingdom. Research investigating why human tool use is special has focused on the role of social learning: while non-human great apes acquire tool-use behaviours mostly by individual (re-)inventions, modern humans use imitation and teaching to accumulate innovations over time. However, little is known about tool-use behaviours that humans can invent individually, i.e. without cultural knowledge. We presented 2- to 3.5-year-old children with 12 problem-solving tasks based on tool-use behaviours shown by great apes. Spontaneous tool use was observed in 11 tasks. Additionally, tasks which occurred more frequently in wild great apes were also solved more frequently by human children. Our results demonstrate great similarity in the spontaneous tool-use abilities of human children and great apes, indicating that the physical cognition underlying tool use shows large overlaps across the great ape species. This suggests that humans are neither born with special physical cognition skills, nor that these skills have degraded due to our species’ long reliance of social learning in the tool-use domain.人造工具的多样性与复杂性在动物界中独树一帜。针对人类工具使用为何独具特殊性的研究，长期聚焦于社会学习的作用：非人类类人猿（non-human great apes）的工具使用行为大多通过个体（重新）发明获得，而现代人类则借助模仿与教学，随时间推移不断累积创新成果。然而，学界对人类无需文化知识即可独立发明的工具使用行为仍了解十分有限。我们向2至3.5岁的儿童展示了12项基于类人猿工具使用行为的问题解决任务，研究人员在其中11项任务中均观测到了自发工具使用行为。此外，野生类人猿中出现频率更高的任务，人类儿童完成这些任务的频率也同样更高。我们的研究结果表明，人类儿童与类人猿的自发工具使用能力存在高度相似性，这意味着支撑工具使用的物理认知能力在各类类人猿物种间存在大量重叠。这一发现暗示，人类既非天生具备特殊的物理认知技能，也未因人类社会长期依赖工具使用领域的社会学习而导致此类技能出现退化。