Bounded contexts appear reasonable for considering cultural phenomena in many primate species  and the kind of bounded cumulative culture observed here provides a putative evolutionary precursor to more open-ended forms of cumulative culture. However, our results suggest that precisely because the cumulative process is expressed at a repertoire level and bounded, detecting existing cumulative cultural processes empirically may be very difficult. We would expect a bounded cumulative cultural process to operate for some time, but then level off. Thus when observing primates in the wild, researchers may well be measuring the outcome of a cumulative cultural process, where the phenotypes observed cannot be achieved within a single lifetime, even though changes in time may not be detectable. Moreover, quantifying the difficulty of acquiring a particular repertoire and detecting social influences is extremely difficult , which could help to explain the lack of empirical evidence for such cumulative processes. Studying the reintroduction of animal species to the wild may be a promising setting in which to study the possibility of cumulative cultural change in animals across generations. The difficulty of successful re-introductions to the wild, especially those in great apes , could be an indication of a dependence on cumulative culture.