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- Majority-Biased Transmission in Chimpanzees and Human
Children, but Not Orangutans Current Biology, Volume 22, Issue
8, 24 April 2012, Pages 727-731 Daniel B.M. Haun, Yvonne Rekers
and Michael Tomasello SummaryCultural transmission is a key
component of human evolution. Two of humans' closest living
relatives, chimpanzees and orangutans, have also been argued to
transmit behavioral traditions across generations culturally
[1,2,3], but how much the process might resemble the human
process is still in large part unknown. One key phenomenon of
human cultural transmission is majority-biased transmission: the
increased likelihood for learners to end up not with the most
frequent behavior but rather with the behavior demonstrated by
most individuals. Here we show that chimpanzees and human
children as young as 2 years of age, but not orangutans, are
more likely to copy an action performed