Technological Cultures in Capuchin Monkeys: an Archeological and Behavioural exploration

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Animal cultures represent an often neglected layer of biological diversity and a powerful model for the study of human evolution. Robust capuchin monkeys (Sapajus spp.) are emerging as a new model for cultural and technological evolution in humans, phylogenetically independent from the established chimpanzee model. Available data suggest a great potential for cultural diversity across the robust capuchins range, especially within the tool use domain. However, capuchins’ behavioural diversity remains so far mostly unknown. This fellowship will establish an innovative, multidisciplinary protocol to map tool use traditions across space and time in wild capuchins not habituated to human presence. The training through research activity will allow me, a field primatologist, to acquire essential skills to describe animal tool use from an archeological perspective and strengthen my ability to conceive, design and apply behavioral experiments. Specifically, I propose to: - use environmental surveys and camera trap monitoring to describe tool use behaviour at a new site in terms of behavioural repertoire, tool selection and tool transport; - test and apply a new approach, based on field experiments, to detect tool use behaviours in primate populations not habituated to human presence; - excavate tool use sites to trace the temporal development of technological traditions at a previously unstudied geographical location with unhabituated capuchins. This research will i) extend, for the first time, the field of primate archeology to unhabituated populations of non-human tool-using primates and ii) serve as a platform to launch a large-scale, multidisciplinary exploration of technological and cultural diversity in robust capuchins. This will ultimately allow to tackle the ecological and cultural drivers of behavioural diversity in capuchins and to shed light into evolutionary scenarios about human cultural evolution and the emergence of tool use.