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Recent comparative work has claimed the presence of socially transmitted behavioral innovations, ranging from tool use to sounds produced during nest building, i.e. culture, among wild orangutans. Much independent information is corroborating this interpretation. Here, after discussing the possible sources of error in this geographic approach, the chapter updates the estimate of the orangutan’s cultural repertoire by presenting the most recent table of locally varying (i.e. non-universal) orangutan behaviors found after exhaustive comparisons of records from eight sites with long-term orangutan field studies. There now is a minimum of between 26 and 35 of such cultural variants, depending on how one assesses the risk that some of them may in fact be hidden universals, missed by some observers or performed too rarely to be reliably recorded. There was little evidence for the alternative models explaining the geographic variation as an outcome of broad reaction norms toward variable ecology or demography, or of genetic differences between populations, both indicating an absence of social learning.

There are consistent individual differences in human intelligence, attributable to a single ‘general intelligence’ factor, g. The evolutionary basis of g and its links to social learning and culture remain controversial. Conflicting hypotheses regard primate cognition as divided into specialized, independently evolving modules versus a single general process. To assess how processes underlying culture relate to one another and other cognitive capacities, we compiled ecologically relevant cognitive measures from multiple domains, namely reported incidences of behavioural innovation, social learning, tool use, extractive foraging and tactical deception, in 62 primate species. All exhibited strong positive associations in principal component and factor analyses, after statistically controlling for multiple potential confounds. This highly correlated composite of cognitive traits suggests social, technical and ecological abilities have coevolved in primates, indicative of an across-species general intelligence that includes elements of cultural intelligence. Our composite species-level measure of general intelligence, ‘primate g_S’, covaried with both brain volume and captive learning performance measures. Our findings question the independence of cognitive traits and do not support ‘massive modularity’ in primate cognition, nor an exclusively social model of primate intelligence. High general intelligence has independently evolved at least four times, with convergent evolution in capuchins, baboons, macaques and great apes.

Urbanization is one of the most drastic alterations of natural habitats, causing sudden adaptive mismatches that make population persistence difficult for many organisms. Urban contexts may be challenging for adaptation, particularly for animals with long generation times with slow evolutionary responses. This chapter argues that cognition may play a major role in facilitating evolutionary adaptation of animals to the urban environment. By regulating how animals gather, preserve, and use information, cognition can influence adaptive evolution in urban areas by (1) allowing individuals to choose the habitats and resources that better match their phenotypes, and (2) helping animals to construct learned responses to challenges they have never or rarely experienced before. These cognitive processes can weaken the strength of selection. However, they can also facilitate adaptive evolution by reducing the risk of population extinction and by ensuring that individuals are more gradually exposed to the new conditions. In addition, cognitive processes can maintain genetic diversity for selection to act upon in the future as well as promoting local adaptation by reducing gene flow with nearby non-urban populations. Finally, learned behaviours can allow the population to move close to the realm of attraction of new adaptive peaks, driving evolution toward novel directions. Cognition itself may also evolve in urban areas—particularly in long-lived generalists—if it exhibits enough heritable variation. Echoing recent suggestions in cognitive ecology, the chapter highlights the need to design and carry out experiments explicitly designed to assess the evolutionary consequences of cognition in urban populations.