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Reconsidering the Meaning of Culture and its Uniqueness to Humans

By Inès SAA

Introduction

Have you ever picked up your phone and wondered: how did it come to be? This question is applicable to any object or device that makes up our everyday lives, but too often it is neglected if not even thought up. In fact, as we grow accustomed to our surroundings, we fail to notice the peculiar.

Culture is one of such peculiar things that blends in our surroundings in various forms: the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the music we make, the languages we speak, the beliefs we hold, the technologies we rely on, as well as many other daily habits and principles we live by, but it’s also a much more simple concept than we might think. Due to its multifaceted nature, culture has been largely studied through various sciences, most of which focused on culture as a human attribute. For that reason, it has for long been thought that the origin of culture is man.

However, increasing knowledge on animal behavior and social learning has proved otherwise. Culture can be thought of as an evolutionary trait which the first hominids inherited as rudimentary cultural traits and later gained in complexity. So, instead of a purely anthropological approach, it seems that a bioanthropological approach is better suited to deepen our understanding of human culture (Laland, 2017).

Explaining human culture through evolutionary biology and animal behavior ultimately leads to a reassessment of what culture means and its uniqueness to man.

Overcoming anthropocentrism

Human uniqueness is often based on cognitive and physiological capacities such as high intelligence, language and morality (National Academy of Sciences, 2010). Yet, it is known now that a variety of mammals and avians also possess these attributes, which thereby challenges anthropocentrism – the belief that man is superior to other beings (Rae, 2014) – and builds a solid ground on which animal culture can be considered. 

First, high intelligence is extensively studied in corvids, and primates as they typically display advanced reasoning and problem-solving abilities. Primates and humans are known to be closely related and share a high percentage of genetical similarities, with chimpanzees and bonobos being the closest species to mankind. But common ancestry isn’t the key to high intelligence since corvids, who are avians and thus a different class of vertebrates that have diverged from mammals, display cognitive abilities that occasionally surpass those of primates. Most intelligence measuring tests for corvids focus on memory, awareness of surroundings, predicting another individual’s behavior based on previous knowledge of their character (Theory of mind), judgment, decision making, and planning. Carrion crows and magpies usually pass these tests successfully and show cognitive flexibility and adaptability (Ma, 2015). 

Second, spoken language in humans is characterized by its diversity and complex structuring. The usage of speech rules and grammar to standardize a language and facilitate communication doesn’t seem like an adaptation other animals would need. Yet, cetaceans, a class of mammals including whales and dolphins, hold the potential to have said adaptation. In fact, the humpback whales are one of the few mammals that display highly structured vocal sounds called songs. If people use words to make sentences and sentences to form ideas and speech, then humpback whales have ‘units’, one clear continuous sound, that can vary in tone and make up ‘phrases’. The repetition of one phrase forms a ‘theme’ and many themes constitute a song. The sequencing of units is non-random, and the singing of themes has a strict order (Dartnell, 2013). Despite the song’s structured nature, for it to be recognized as a language it needs to be recursive and show further evidence of lexical category structure. Lewis Dartnell has taken on the hypothesis that whale songs might be the first non-human language yet discovered. Through a thorough analysis of various experiments, he concludes that results indicate the existence of grammar in the songs of humpback whales, which supports the idea that the primary function of the songs is language.

Finally, both animals and humans are moral subjects, capable of behaving upon moral motivations (Monsó et al., 2018). Rats are highly perceptive beings that have repeatedly shown through, ironically, ethically questionable experiments that they are capable of altruism and empathy. Empathy designates the capacity to emotionally relate to another individual’s emotional state and chose to act accordingly. Russel Church’s experiments on the “emotional reactions of rats to the pain of others” in 1959 shows that the rodents will experience fear and distress at the sight of another rat being shocked after lowering a lever that habitually provided them with food. As the rodents understands that getting food is now at the expense of a cage mate getting shocked, the rats deliberately avoided the lever to prevent cage mates from being harmed. This selflessness or rather altruistic and highly moral behavior in rats suggests they are also able to separate wrong from good. Further experiments have supported the idea that rats don’t act based on personal benefit such as being rewarded food or freedom but are motivated by the moral duty of rescuing a fellow cage mate in distress. As experimenting methods progress, more is learned of animal capacities and their potential to have culture.

Animal Culture

When considering animal culture, different scientist will frame their research based on various criteria such as transmission via social learning or teaching, the passing down of knowledge over multiple generations or traditions, complexity, and variability in behaviors. To learn from others is both an efficient and safe way of accumulating knowledge required to lead a sustainable life (Whiten, 2021). Social learning is therefore, to date, the most global way through which culture happens and is transmitted. That is partly because the passing down of knowledge, in the form of either imitation or teaching, allows for the selection and the refinement of useful skills. This cumulative property is typical of human cultures. Although mostly complex, human culture also has simpler socially learned components to it.

Likewise, orangutans have a variety of socially learned skills ranging from basic subsistence skills to high complexity skills all of which constitute cultural knowledge (Schuppli et al., 2019). These skills can be affected by environmental changes, leading to cultural variation. In other words, if ecological changes happen, a population of orangutans can adapt their foraging and nest building skills accordingly by behaving in novel ways. Innovativeness in this case is additional evidence that culture is present in animal lives too.

Furthermore, novel behaviors can sometimes spread and become traditions. A specific example is that of Imo a Japanese macaque who was once given a sweet potato by researchers and then proceeded to salt the potato in salt water before consuming it. This behavior spread to other macaques and was continuously performed for five years (1953-1958) until salt washing potatoes became a tradition within most members of the population, especially those born around the time the tradition emerged (Hirata, 2001). One possible interpretation for the reason behind Imo’s behavior is, quite simply and intuitively, that potatoes taste better when salted. This reasoning is what lead to gastronomy in human culture: the idea that a food would taste better if slightly or extensively modified through combination with other ingredients or foods. The possibility that Imo didn’t intend to salt the potato but simply to wash itis thinkable. However, that just means the novel behavior of ‘salting’ was initially triggered by the common knowledge of ‘washing’ the potato, which is a sort of cultural knowledge on its own.

Culture and Evolutionary Biology

The driving force of progress and change in biology is evolution. Slow changes over long periods of time are what allowed for the refinement and accumulation of emergent properties as organisms gained in complexity. The theory of evolution has explained multiple biological features and phenomena; however, it can also explain human culture. As a matter of fact, “cultural evolution is deeply intertwined with biological evolution” as stated by Borg et al., 2024. Having evolved a brain is the reason why a set of animals, including the first hominids, were able to think and perform other cognitive tasks which inevitably led to culture making. From there onward, culture evolved alongside cognition. This would imply that animal and human cultures are part of a continuum that started with rudimentary cephalization and dispersed nervous system in flatworms and then evolved, through speciation events, into centralized nervous systems baring cognitively flexible and highly adaptative brain organs.

As culture is demonstrated to be shared between man and animal, new theories aiming to prove human uniqueness are formed. There is notably Morgan Llyod’s theory of Open-Endedness which states that both man and animal may display cumulative cultures, but only humans have an “open-ended” culture (Borg et al., 2024). This theory refers, in a way, to people’s capacity to project themselves into the future. An open-ended culture is therefore met with continuously producing novel behaviors and has little limitations.

Conclusion

Culture in essence is the transfer of accumulated knowledge through social learning. It concerns both animals and humans. Through the study of evolutionary biology and specifically human cognition evolution, it becomes clear that cultural traits developed along with cognitive tasks such as memory, socializing, communication, etc.

The bioanthropological approach therefore succeeds in showing the continuum between man and animal, thereby disproving anthropocentrism and narrowing the possibilities for scientist to find what really makes humans unique as attempted by the Open-Endedness Theory.

Bibliography

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