Human-macaque Co-construction of Behaviours: Sharing Spaces, Sharing Food, Sharing Lives

Humans and other-than-human-animals (animals) share spaces, food, and lives. This gives rise to possibilities of interspecific learning, social facilitation and interspecific communication, and the potential for location- and group-specific behaviors in both groups. Most macaque species are synanthropes (i.e., species who live near humans and use human resources) and have shared habitats with humans for millennia. In adjusting to the same habitats and resources, ecological niches might be co-created by humans and macaques wherein novel socially learned behaviors emerge and location-specific cultures arise. Socially learned behaviors can develop in macaques without human presence, or novel behaviors may emerge due to facilitation from the dynamic of the human-macaque interface as an outcome of direct or indirect interactions between humans and macaques. We propose that direct or indirect interactions between humans and macaques can be envisioned as human-macaque co-constructed behavior and, if embedded in the populations of both humans and macaques, could become co-culture. We use three case studies to exemplify the spectrum of this co-construction process and outline the different levels of co-constructed behaviors and explain how they can emerge in shared human-macaque interfaces. Whereas other primate social traditions, often referred to as “primate cultures,” are considered to be threatened in anthropogenic landscapes (the “disturbance hypothesis”), co-constructed behaviors between humans and macaques may endure in human-influenced and rapidly changing environments and even proliferate. This dynamic has implications for primate conservation as co-constructed behaviors could facilitate coexistence. To better assess existing behavioral traditions (or cultures) in primates and to better understand their emergence and maintenance, researchers will need to examine in greater depth the possibility that the co-creation and co-shaping of niches and behavioral ecologies may be a key characteristic of some human-primate interfaces.