Data from: Young children spontaneously invent wild great apes’ tool-use behaviors

The variety and complexity of human-made tools is 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 behaviors mostly by individual (re-)inventions, modern humans use imitation and teaching to accumulate innovations over time. However, little is known about tool-use behaviors 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 behaviors 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.

人类制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具有特殊性的研究，历来聚焦于社会学习的作用：非人类大型类人猿（great apes）大多通过个体（重新）发明掌握工具使用行为，而现代人类则借助模仿与教学，随时间推移逐步累积创新成果。然而，对于人类无需文化积淀即可独自发明的工具使用行为，目前所知甚少。我们为2至3.5岁的儿童设置了12项基于大型类人猿工具使用行为的问题解决任务，在其中11项任务中均观察到了自发的工具使用行为；此外，野生大型类人猿更常出现的工具使用任务，人类儿童的完成频率也更高。本研究结果显示，人类儿童与大型类人猿的自发工具使用能力高度相似，这表明支撑工具使用的物理认知能力，在各类大型类人猿物种间存在大量重叠。这意味着人类既非天生具备特殊的物理认知技能，也未因本物种在工具使用领域长期依赖社会学习，而导致此类技能出现退化。