Dora Biro, Susana Carvalho, and Tetsuro Matsuzawa variability across tool-use, social, and self-maintenance domains singles out the chimpanzee as the most obvious first step in the search for the evolutionary origins of human culture (McGrew 2004). Nowhere else in the animal world does belonging to a specific community appear to have such diverse influences on individual behavior. Each chimpanzee community possesses a unique set of skills that makes its members adept at dealing with a multitude of problems posed by the environment—sometimes presenting ingeniously different solutions for similar problems across different groups—but to what extent do these observed patterns in the regional distribution of behaviors really represent a form of culture? Suggestions that neither ecological nor genetic differences among groups can fully explain such inter-community differences point strongly towards social learning as being responsible for the emergence and maintenance of the variation—hence the “culture” label. However, ruling out ecological constraints as determinants of large-scale differences (for example, the absence or presence of a given tool-use behavior) is often difficult. Similarly, factors underlying differences in the precise characteristics of the tools used by members of a particular community compared to those preferred by another community for superficially similar purposes are often problematic to ascertain. In addition, while evidence for the involvement of social learning in withincommunity maintenance of behaviors can to some extent