Amazing stuff!
The convenient and usual blame on humans should be discounted!
"Just like humans, chimpanzees have different “dialects”—in the gestures they use to communicate. A new study has found that males from different chimp communities in the Taï National Park in Ivory Coast use different gestures to signal to females that they’re in the mood for sex.
Male chimps can make various moves to show they want some “sneaky copulation on the side,” ... When Wittig’s team looked at records of 495 of these gestures in four neighboring chimp communities, they found clear differences. In two of the four groups, for example, males tore strips from leaves to request sex. Another gesture, the “knuckle knock”—repeatedly knocking knuckles onto a tree or another hard surface—occurred in only one. ..."
From the abstract:
"The horizontal transmission of cultural knowledge is a powerful mechanism of evolutionary change. Across taxa, group-specific cultural traditions are expressed in diverse contexts, such as foraging, tool use, self-care and socialization. These traditions arise when group members converge on specific behavioral phenotypes. When these behavioral phenotypes involve communicative signals, such as gestures, they are termed dialects.
However, gestural dialects are rare in non-humans. Behavioral phenotypes and traditions can also be lost, a well-documented phenomenon in humans, but rarely documented in non-human animals. Here, we find that chimpanzee gestures produced in copulation solicitations show culturally established phenotypes and undergo cultural loss due to human-induced population decline."
Male chimps ask for sex in different ‘dialects’ "Gestures are in danger because of poaching and other human pressures"
Signal traditions and cultural loss in chimpanzees (open access)
Figure 1 Evidence for socially derived gesture dialects in chimpanzees.
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