Cultural transmission: A view from chimpanzees and human infants
Introduction Primates are highly social beings. They begin their lives clinging to their mother and nursing, and they spend their next few months, or even years, still in proximity to her. Adult primates live in close-knit social groups, for the most part, in which members individually recognize one another and form various types of long-term social relationships (Tomasello & Call, 1994, 1997). As primates, human beings follow this same pattern, of course, but they also have unique forms of sociality that may be characterized as “ultrasocial” or, in more common parlance, “cultural” (Tomasello, Krüger, & Ratner, 1993). The forms of sociality that are mostly clearly unique to human beings emerge in their ontogeny at approximately 9 months of age - what I have called the 9-month social-cognitive revolution (Tomasello, 1995). This is the age at which infants typically begin to engage in the kinds of joint-attentional interactions in which they master the use of cultural artifacts, including tools and language, and become fully active participants in all types of cultural rituals, scripts, and games. In this chapter, my goals are to (1) characterize the primate and human forms of sociality and cultural transmission, and (2) characterize in more detail the ontogeny of human cultural propensities.
