• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

The Difference Between Human And Animal Culture Is Not What We Thought

November 7, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

In our attempts to identify how human culture differs from that of other animals we have been focusing on the wrong things, a new paper argues. What is distinctive is how flexible our culture is, allowing development in many directions, rather than a capacity to build on previously transmitted cultural behaviors.

Humans have spent so much intellectual effort trying to work out what makes us unique, it’s almost like we have a complex about the topic. Over the years, one characteristic after another that was proclaimed as distinctly human has turned out to occur in animals, sometimes quite widely. Once we’ve ruled out reasoning, tools, fire, laughter, theory of mind, and cultural transmission, what is left?

Advertisement

“Ten years ago it was basically accepted that it was the ability of human culture to accumulate and evolve that made us special, but new discoveries about animal behavior are challenging these ideas and forcing us to rethink what makes our cultures, and us as a species, unique,” said Dr Thomas Morgan of Arizona State University, Tempe in a statement. 

Some people would take this observation and argue that humans are not in fact unique, that we’re just one animal among many, albeit one whose tools are noticeably more complex. Morgan and co-author Professor Marcus Feldman of Stanford disagree. They note that humans have achieved an ecological dominance that sets us apart. In a world where humans and our livestock now make up 96 percent of mammalian terrestrial biomass, leaving just 3 percent for lions, tigers, bears and everything else, it’s a convincing case.

Much as our individual intelligence has contributed to us reaching this point, it’s definitely not the whole story. Our dominance is a product of thousands of technological advances, with no single individual responsible for more than a few. Our culture allows us to collect together these achievements and build on them; as Morgan says, it was thought few if any animals could do this.

Morgan and Feldman spend some time in their paper collecting examples from across the animal kingdom to show that social animals also accumulate culture, albeit sometimes in ways we may not immediately recognize. Having rebutted the cumulative hypothesis, they consider seven alternative theories of how human culture differs from that of animals, and reject each, before presenting their own explanation: that it is the open-endedness of human culture that sets us apart.

Advertisement

One example the pair use to show animals can have cumulative cultures comes from leafcutter ants, which depend on farming a fungus for nutrients. Future queens take some fungus with them when they go to start a new colony. The symbiotic relationship means the fungus they use has evolved over millions of years and is now substantially different from those that exist ant-free. The fungus is part of the ants’ culture, and the cumulative changes in its genome have made it more suited to colony success. This also refutes an alternative version of the cumulative culture hypothesis, that it is our capacity for reliable transmission of changes that sets our culture apart.

If you’re struggling to consider a fungus a form of culture, consider that among the master toolmakers, New Caledonian crows, those living in some regions make more complex tools than others. It’s unlikely there are major genetic differences that could account for this; instead, crows in some parts of the island probably developed a culture of more advanced tool-making. Even clearer regional differences exist among chimpanzees when making termite-catching tools.

Where human culture differs from that of animals, Morgan and Feldman argue, is in the flexibility it displays in the sort of new behaviors it can incorporate. Animals can develop cultures for confronting predators, for example, but these tend to come from a narrow range of possibilities. When inheritance is epigenetic, it can only work on the genetic range available to it. Likewise animal cultures find ways to more efficiently exploit natural phenomena, but humans have demonstrated our capacity to adapt our culture to circumstances unlike anything we have encountered before.

Summarizing all the theories the authors consider, let alone the astonishing examples they offer to refute them, would require a much longer article. 

Advertisement

Fortunately, the study is published open access in Nature Human Behavior.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Factbox-What analysts have to say about Evergrande as default risks rise
  2. This App Is The Secret To Happy Houseplants
  3. Adding Gold To Wine Could Be The Key To Making It Taste Better
  4. The Atlantic Gulf Stream Was Unexpectedly Strong During The Last Ice Age – New Study

Source Link: The Difference Between Human And Animal Culture Is Not What We Thought

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Anyone Know What These Marine “Y-Larvae” Grow Into? Because Scientists Have No Clue
  • C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) Closest Earth Approach Is Next Month – Will We See It With The Naked Eye?
  • In 2013, A Volcanic Eruption Wiped Out Life On This Remote Island. Then, Somehow, Plants Reemerged
  • 1-Year-Old Orca Takes Out A Big Fat Seal In This Award-Winning – And Extremely Badass – Photo
  • Saturn And Neptune Will Reach Their Brightest In Days – And Look For Saturn’s Temporary Beauty Spot
  • Reindeer Bring A Gift Greater Than Any Of Santa’s – Hope Of A Stable Climate
  • If Deep-Sea Pressure Can Crush A Human Body, How Do Deep-Sea Creatures Not Implode?
  • Meet Ned: The Lonely Lefty Snail Looking For Love
  • “America Will Lead The Next Giant Leap”: NASA Announces New Milestone In Hunt For Exoplanets
  • What Did Neanderthals Sound Like?
  • One Star System Could Soon Dazzle Us Twice With Nova And Supernova Explosions
  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version