Culture is critical in driving orangutan diet development past individual potentials

Humans accumulate extensive repertoires of culturally transmitted information, reaching breadths exceeding any individual’s innovation capacity (culturally dependent repertoires). It is unclear whether other animals require social learning to acquire adult-like breadths of information in the wild, including by key developmental milestones, or whether animals are capable of constructing their knowledge repertoires primarily through independent exploration. We investigated whether social learning mediates orangutans’ diet-repertoire development, by translating an extensive dataset describing wild orangutans’ behaviour into an empirically validated agent-based model. In this model, diets reliably developed to adult-like breadths only when simulated immatures benefited from multiple forms of social learning. Moreover, social learning was required for diets to reach adult-like breadths by the age immatures become independent from their mothers. This implies that orangutan diets constitute culturally dependent repertoires, with social learning enhancing the rate and outcomes of diet development past individual potentials. We discuss prospective avenues for researching the building of cultural repertoires in hominids and other species.