If you watch chimpanzees from different parts of Africa, you’ll
see them doing very different things. Some use sticks to extract
honey from beehives, while others prefer leaves. Some use sticks
as hunting spears and others use them to fish for ants. Some
drum on branches to get attention and others rip leaves between
their teeth. These behaviours have been described as cultural
traditions; they’re the chimp equivalent of the musical styles,
fashion trends and social rules of humans. They stem from the
readiness of great apes to ape one another and pick up
behaviours from their peers. But a new study complicates our
understanding of chimp cultures. Kevin Langergraber at the Max
Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology has found that
much of this variation in behaviour could have a genetic
influence. Langergraber studied almost 250 chimps, who came from
9 groups, including 3 from the west African subspecies and 6
from the east African one. For each one, he noted whether they
performed any of 39 different