Have you ever heard the theory of the 100th monkey?
In the 1950’s biologists and anthropologists were studying the behavior of a species of monkeys that live on some of the outlying islands around Japan. In order to gain the confidence of the monkeys and get close enough to study their behavior, the scientists would place sweet potatoes on the beach. The monkeys adored these moist potatoes (called batatas), but disliked the sand clinging to them. One day an adolescent female monkey (about eighteen months old) on the island of Koshima, solved this problem by washing her batata in fresh spring water.
She taught the “trick” to her mother, and then to her playmates, and over a period of time most of the monkeys on the island learned to wash their batatas to get rid of the sand. At this point perhaps 99 monkeys had been trained in this behavior. One day the 100th monkey learned how to wash his batata. By the next day every single monkey on the island of Koshima was doing this – even the ones who lived a bit more isolated from the others and had never witnessed a demonstration.
But what was particularly astonishing was that this new behavior was suddenly observed in the populations of these same species of monkeys on the other islands. Every monkey in the remote outlying islands was washing away the sand on their sweet potatoes without ever having been taught how to do it!