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Culture extends the scope of evolutionary biology in the great apes.

ABSTRACT: Discoveries about the cultures and cultural capacities of the great apes have played a leading role in the recognition emerging in recent decades that cultural inheritance can be a significant factor in the lives not only of humans but also of nonhuman animals. This prominence derives in part from these primates being those with whom we share the most recent common ancestry, thus offering clues to the origins of our own thoroughgoing reliance on cumulative cultural achievements. In addition, the intense research focus on these species has spawned an unprecedented diversity of complementary methodological approaches, the results of which suggest that cultural phenomena pervade the lives of these apes, with potentially major implications for their broader evolutionary biology. Here I review what this extremely broad array of observational and experimental methodologies has taught us about the cultural lives of chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans and consider the ways in which this knowledge extends our wider understanding of primate biology and the processes of adaptation and evolution that shape it. I address these issues first by evaluating the extent to which the results of cultural inheritance echo a suite of core principles that underlie organic Darwinian evolution but also extend them in new ways and then by assessing the principal causal interactions between the primary, genetically based organic processes of evolution and the secondary system of cultural inheritance that is based on social learning from others.

SUBMITTER: Whiten A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5544264 | biostudies-other | 2017 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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Project description:DNA methylation is an epigenetic modification involved in regulatory processes such as cell differentiation during development, X-chromosome inactivation, genomic imprinting and susceptibility to complex diseases. These changes can be inherited through generations and likely have played an important role during human evolution. We performed a comparative analysis of CpG methylation patterns between humans and all great apes (chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla and orangutan) on a total of 32 individuals.Our analysis identified ~1,000 genes with significantly altered methylation patterns among the great apes, including ~200 with a methylation pattern unique to humans. Analysis of genes with human-specific epigenetic patterns identified enrichments for several functional categories that are key for human-specific traits, such as advanced facial expressions or equilibrium related to bipedalism. We also found a highly significant positive correlation between the genomic distance genome-wide and the methylation levels. In a pairwise comparison, we observed that ~9% (~30,000) of CpGs assayed show significant methylation differences between human and chimpanzee, including promoter regions of 879 genes (11.9% of those tested), suggesting that epigenetic changes have occurred at high frequency during recent primate evolution and represent an important substrate for adaptive modification of genome function. Epigenetic changes among primates are highly enriched for sites showing intermediate DNA methylation levels might be related to regulatory elements, and we observed a significant relationship between changes in DNA methylation and gene expression across multiple different tissues. We also identified a significant positive relationship between the rate of coding variation within genes and alterations of promoter methylation, suggesting concerted evolution between protein sequence and gene regulation. Contrastingly, our analysis also identified scores of genes that are perfectly conserved at the amino acid level between human and chimp, yet which show significant epigenetic difference between these two species. We conclude that epigenetic alterations represent an important force during primate evolution and has been systematically under explored in evolutionary comparative genomics.

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Culture extends the scope of evolutionary biology in the great apes.

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