title: Young children spontaneously invent wild great apes' tool-use behaviours.
abstract: The variety and complexity of human-made tools are unique in the animal kingdom. Research investigating why human tool use is special has focused on the role of social learning: while non-human great apes acquire tool-use behaviours mostly by individual (re-)inventions, modern humans use imitation and teaching to accumulate innovations over time. However, little is known about tool-use behaviours that humans can invent individually, i.e. without cultural knowledge. We presented 2- to 3.5-year-old children with 12 problem-solving tasks based on tool-use behaviours shown by great apes. Spontaneous tool use was observed in 11 tasks. Additionally, tasks which occurred more frequently in wild great apes were also solved more frequently by human children. Our results demonstrate great similarity in the spontaneous tool-use abilities of human children and great apes, indicating that the physical cognition underlying tool use shows large overlaps across the great ape species. This suggests that humans are neither born with special physical cognition skills, nor that these skills have degraded due to our species' long reliance of social learning in the tool-use domain.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK eva.reindl@live.de.
authors.forename: E
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1594-1367
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Reindl
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK.
authors.forename: S R
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6426-1603
authors.initials: SR
authors.lastname: Beck
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK.
authors.forename: I A
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9485-563X
authors.initials: IA
authors.lastname: Apperly
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK.
authors.forename: C
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5302-4925
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Tennie
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D005858:Germany; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D002679:Pan troglodytes / Q000502:physiology*; D010988:Play and Playthings; D057079:Pongo / Q000502:physiology*; D011340:Problem Solving; D053001:Tool Use Behavior; D006113:United Kingdom
keywords: cognitive development; innovation; physical cognition; problem solving; tool use; zone of latent solutions