We’ve talked about fashion before, but a new trend has caught our eye and it’s so interesting we just can’t resist.
Fashion, of course, is a powerful way of communicating feelings of belonging to a group.
Fashions are, unsurprisingly, often kicked off by an influential member of society, whom other people seek to emulate to communicate that they are part of an important club.
This also sometimes happens with other social mammals; you might remember the orcas of Pacific North America and their dead salmon hats, the topic of an earlier post.
Chimpanzees have long fascinated behavioural psychologists just as much as zoologists, because they have so much in common with us humans, including most of our genes, our social behaviour, and our tendency to engage in internecine warfare.
In 2010, an influential, charismatic chimpanzee, known as Julia to the keepers at a wildlife refuge in Zambia, started sticking pieces of grass in her ears, perhaps in imitation of the humans she saw, who sometimes used grass to clean their ears. There was no obvious reason for this new behaviour, but other chimps in the group started doing the same thing; a clear example of someone popular setting a trend and others following.
More recently, in 2023, a male chimpanzee known as Juma upped the ante by not only wearing grass in his ear but adorning his rear end with it too. Within weeks, other chimps were doing the same thing: copying a behaviour that served no obvious function for the purpose of following a fashion.
But fashion does serve a function. It helps us to communicate our feelings of belonging and loyalty to our group or community. And these behaviours on the part of the fashion- conscious chimps offer insights into the evolutionary roots of human culture and language.
Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/two-black-monkeys-xttQG4YyJ6I
