Why do chimpanzees not have advanced culture like humans?

Answer 1

Chimpanzees have a brain that is one-third the size of ours. This limits the scope of their imagination and thinking. However, the biggest reason is that chimps and humans have totally different ways of educating their children. Young chimpanzees learn by watching what their parents do, and then the task is mastered by hours of self-practice. There is a lot of slippage using this method because a child may never master a technique, which means they will not pass it on to their own children. Most innovations in the primate world come from the young. The adults are less willing to adopt new ways of doing things. Not all of the young are guaranteed to adopt it either. This means a novel invention that might have led to a leap in primate technology could be easily forgotten to time. There is no telling how many times this has happened.

Human children, on the other hand, learn directly from adults. They are instructed in a given subject until they grasp the basics of it. In this way, children who master these subjects can build upon and improve them. This is how our technology and culture became so advanced in such a relatively short time frame. For instance, it took less than 70 years between the time of the first airplane flight in 1903 and the first moon landing in 1969. It took three generations and thousands of people building off of the accomplishments of each other for this to happen.