Chimpanzee culture beyond the conspicuous: Evidence for broad-scale observational social learning in wild individuals

Wild chimpanzee cultures have traditionally been studied through group-level comparisons of a limited set of conspicuous skills. The cultural relevance of everyday behaviors, and consequently the full extent of chimpanzee cultural repertoires, has thereby remained largely unexplored. Here, we investigated individual-level cultural processes to assess the breadth of cultural repertoires and patterns of role model selection in a population of wild eastern chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii). First, we validate that wild chimpanzees use peering, i.e., the close-range observation of a conspecific, for targeted social information seeking. We then show that chimpanzees peer at a wide range of everyday skills, such as feeding and grooming, and direct peering toward various conspecifics from an early age. Our findings suggest that wild chimpanzees use peering to learn a wide variety of skills, thereby highlighting unrecognized cultural potential in everyday behaviors. Furthermore, our findings suggest that peering may have multiple functions and underlying motivations.