Why are many researchers looking at how apes and humans imitate actions?
Well, when you compare humans to other animals, the thing that’s most striking is what we humans can build and create as communities—the skills we can pass down from one person to another and from one group to another. If one individual figures out a new skill, and the next individual starts where that first person left off, then you can really speed up the process of building a culture. A lot of things are involved in humans being able to do that, but one little part of it, and one part that we can study in both humans and apes, is the process of imitation.
