New paper by Joseph Mine, Laura Dees, Sabine Stoll, Simon Townsend and colleagues on maternal influence on vocal–visual communicative behavior
In chimpanzees, the extent to which communicative behavior is learned, as opposed to genetically inherited, remains openly debated. This paper addresses this issue within the context of multi-modal communication by investigating kinship patterns in the production of visual behaviors alongside vocal signals in wild chimpanzees from the Kanyawara community, Uganda. The authors report a similarity in the number of visual behaviors combined with vocal signals between individuals who are related via their mother, while no similarity is observed between paternal relatives, in line with the observation that chimpanzee mothers constitute the primary caretakers, while fathers are not involved in parenting. It is concluded that the development of this aspect of multi-modal communicative behavior is unlikely to be genetically driven and is rather a result of learning via exposure to social templates, akin to processes involved in the acquisition of human communication.