The evolutionary roots of innovation

创新能力以及创新的社会传播在人类进化中发挥了核心作用。然而，创新对其他动物也至关重要，因为它能让它们应对新的社会生态挑战。尽管创新在动物的生活中扮演着如此重要的角色，但研究人员直到最近才开始系统地调查创新行为出现所需的条件。最近研究创新的一种很有前途的方法是对野外受试者进行现场实验的管理，它将控制实验程序的使用与生活在自然环境中的受试者的纳入相结合。这种方法主要包括对野生种群进行新的觅食任务管理，并已成功地用于几种食肉动物和鸟类。尽管一些研究使用了类似的方法来研究灵长类动物创新的社会传播，但迄今为止还没有研究系统地调查灵长类动物创新最初是如何出现的，以及影响创新出现的因素是什么。该项目的主要目的是了解解释灵长类动物创新行为出现的因素。我将为属于6个不同物种的至少450个个体提供新的生态相关觅食任务。我将专门测试可能与创新行为出现有关的几个因素的影响，实验证据尚未得出结论。在个人层面上，这些因素包括性别、年龄、军衔、身体状况和个性。我还将包括一个圈养人口进行比较，以了解圈养对创新能力的影响。具体而言，它们包括生态特征（节俭程度、操纵和提取觅食程度、饮食专业化程度）和社会特征（社会群体规模、裂变融合水平、统治风格）。此外，我将研究灵长类动物的不同创新方式（例如，个体是否有洞察力的创新，以及个体创新、社会促进和创新的社会学习的相对发生率）。包含许多个体和物种将使我能够研究创新中的种内和种间变异性，同时也提供了不同个体和社会创新形式之间的细粒度区分。因此，这项研究的结果对于解释哪些进化过程最有可能产生创新行为至关重要，为人类创新的进化起源提供了线索。

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.