Publications by authors named "M A Van Noordwijk"

Article Synopsis
  • Cumulative culture, an important aspect of human evolution, has its origins in the common ancestor shared with chimpanzees, revealing early pathways of cultural transmission.
  • The study analyzed genetic markers and cultural traits across four chimpanzee subspecies to understand how their cultural practices developed and remained limited.
  • It was found that low inter-group connectivity in chimpanzees led to isolated instances of culture evolving step-by-step, suggesting that social behaviors influenced mobility and cultural exchange among different groups.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Unlabelled: Play is thought to serve different purposes at different times during ontogeny. The nature and frequency of play are expected to change accordingly over the developmental trajectory and with socio-ecological context. Orangutans offer the opportunity to disentangle the ontogenetic trajectories of solitary and social play with their extended immature phase, and socio-ecological variation among populations and species.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Humans' colonization of diverse habitats relied on our ancestors' abilities to innovate and share innovations with others. While ecological impacts on innovations are well studied, their effect on social learning remains poorly understood. We examined how food availability affects social learning in migrant orangutan unflanged males, who may learn from local orangutans through peering (i.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Abstract: In many group-living species, individuals are required to flexibly modify their communicative behaviour in response to current social challenges. To unravel whether sociality and communication systems co-evolve, research efforts have often targeted the links between social organisation and communicative repertoires. However, it is still unclear which social or interactional factors directly predict communicative complexity.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Abstract: The social and mating systems of orangutans, one of our closest relatives, remain poorly understood. Orangutans ( spp) are highly sexually dimorphic and females are philopatric and maintain individual, but overlapping home ranges, whereas males disperse, are non-territorial and wide-ranging, and show bimaturism, with many years between reaching sexual maturity and attaining full secondary sexual characteristics (including cheek pads (flanges) and emitting long calls). We report on 21 assigned paternities, among 35 flanged and 15 unflanged, genotyped male Bornean orangutans (), studied from 2003 to 2018 in Tuanan (Central Kalimantan, Indonesia).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF