| Achoimre: | <jats:title>Abstract</jats:title>
Most cultural behaviours in primates stem from innovations that are beneficial since they provide access to food or comfort. Innovations that are seemingly purposeless and arbitrary, and nevertheless spread through a social group, are rarer but particularly relevant to understanding the evolutionary origin of culture. Here, we provide an anecdotal report of a series of non-instrumental woodchip manipulation and modification events in captive cotton-top tamarins. Intriguingly, woodchips were preferentially manipulated in a position that was readily visible to a partner in a different enclosure, and the innovation apparently spread to other individuals. Together, this suggests that the arbitrary innovation was actively shared with a conspecific, which is consistent with the pattern of transmission of another arbitrary innovation in cotton-top tamarins, namely stick-weaving.
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