Gorilla Communities

It is, I would hope, well-known that the closest living genus to our own is that of the chimpanzees and bonobos. The second-closest is, of course, that of the gorillas. There are two species of gorilla, each with two subspecies, and both are considered "critically endangered" - literally on the verge of extinction. For one species, this is, as one would expect, largely due to their tiny surviving population and restricted range. 

There are many factors that we need to consider when attempting to reverse this, and some of them also have a bearing on the evolution of our own species. Among these is the question of how gorilla groups are socially constructed and how they interact. It turns out that here, we can't just consider "gorillas" en masse because the two species behave in very different ways. For example, while one species can have multiple silverback males in the same troop, this is rare (but not unheard of) in the other.

Do Gorillas Have Culture?

Animal behaviour is generally instinctual. Their behaviour is, in some way, wired into their genetics, and doesn't vary from one animal to another. Particularly in mammals and birds, individual animals may be shaped by their life experiences, learning new things as they go. But what they can't do, as a rule, is pass that information on to others. Mothers may teach their young how to do certain things, but that teaching process is itself instinctual, so that all animals of a given species learn more or less the same thing as infants.

A large part of the success of our own species is down to our ability to circumvent this, to build on the knowledge of previous generations. This results, among other things, in the development of culture, differences in behaviour based not on the experiences of only one individual, but of their ancestors, in a way that isn't genetic. Britain and Japan are different culturally, not just because of environmental variation (Japan has earthquakes, for example, and has different mineral resources than Britain) but simply because of the vicissitudes of history, the separate evolution of their languages, and so on.