The evolutionary roots of innovation

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The ability to innovate, and the social transmission of innovations, have played a central role in human evolution. However, innovation is also crucial for other animals, by allowing them to cope with novel socio-ecological challenges. Although innovation plays such a central role in animals' lives, researchers have only recently started to systematically investigate the conditions required for innovative behaviour to emerge. A recent promising approach to the study of innovation is the administration of field experiments to wild subjects, which combines the use of controlled experimental procedures with the inclusion of subjects living in their natural environment. This approach basically consists in the administration of novel foraging tasks to wild populations, and it has been successfully used with several carnivore and bird species. Although some studies have used a similar approach to examine the social transmission of innovations in primates, no study has so far systematically investigated how innovation emerges in primates in the first place, and which are the factors affecting its emergence. The main aim of this project is to understand the factors that explain the emergence of innovative behaviour in primates. I will provide novel ecologically relevant foraging tasks to a minimum of 450 individuals belonging to 6 different species. I will specifically test the effect of several factors possibly linked to the emergence of innovative behaviour, for which experimental evidence is yet inconclusive. At the individual level, these factors include sex, age, rank, body condition and personality. I will also include a captive population for comparison, to understand the effects of captivity on the ability to innovate. At the specific level, they include ecological characteristics (degree of frugivory, degree of manipulative and extractive foraging, degree of diet specialization) and social characteristics (social group size, fission-fusion levels, dominance style). Moreover, I will investigate the different ways primates use to innovate (e.g. whether individuals innovate with insight, and the relative incidence of individual innovation, social facilitation and social learning of innovations). The inclusion of many individuals and species will crucially allow me to investigate both intra-specific and inter-specific variability in innovation, while also providing a fine-grained distinction across different individual and social forms of innovation. The results of this study will therefore be crucial to explain which evolutionary processes most likely generate innovative behaviour, shedding light into the evolutionary origins of human innovation.