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      Animal cultures: how we've only seen the tip of the iceberg

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          Abstract

          Abstract

          For humans we implicitly assume that the way we do things is the product of social learning and thus cultural. For animals, this conclusion requires proof. Here, we first review the most commonly used procedure for documenting animal culture: the method of exclusion, which charts geographic behavioral variation between populations as evidence for culture. Using published data, we show that, whereas it is an adequate proof of principle, the method of exclusion has major deficiencies when capturing cultural diversity and complexity. Therefore, we propose a new method, namely the direct counting of socially learned skills, which we apply to previously collected data on wild orangutans. This method reveals a far greater cultural repertoire among orangutans, and a different distribution of cultural elements among behavioral domains than found by the method of exclusion, as well as clear ecological correlates for most cultural elements. The widespread occurrence of social learning ability throughout the animal kingdom suggests that these conclusions also apply to many other species. Culture is most likely more widespread and pervasive than commonly thought and an important avenue to local adaptation. The complex and normative dimensions of culture seem unique to our species, but were most likely built upon a very broad, pre-existing cultural capacity that we inherited from our ancestors.

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          Cultural learning

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            Ratcheting up the ratchet: on the evolution of cumulative culture.

            Some researchers have claimed that chimpanzee and human culture rest on homologous cognitive and learning mechanisms. While clearly there are some homologous mechanisms, we argue here that there are some different mechanisms at work as well. Chimpanzee cultural traditions represent behavioural biases of different populations, all within the species' existing cognitive repertoire (what we call the 'zone of latent solutions') that are generated by founder effects, individual learning and mostly product-oriented (rather than process-oriented) copying. Human culture, in contrast, has the distinctive characteristic that it accumulates modifications over time (what we call the 'ratchet effect'). This difference results from the facts that (i) human social learning is more oriented towards process than product and (ii) unique forms of human cooperation lead to active teaching, social motivations for conformity and normative sanctions against non-conformity. Together, these unique processes of social learning and cooperation lead to humans' unique form of cumulative cultural evolution.
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              Orangutan cultures and the evolution of material culture.

              Geographic variation in some aspects of chimpanzee behavior has been interpreted as evidence for culture. Here we document similar geographic variation in orangutan behaviors. Moreover, as expected under a cultural interpretation, we find a correlation between geographic distance and cultural difference, a correlation between the abundance of opportunities for social learning and the size of the local cultural repertoire, and no effect of habitat on the content of culture. Hence, great-ape cultures exist, and may have done so for at least 14 million years.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Evol Hum Sci
                Evol Hum Sci
                EHS
                Evolutionary Human Sciences
                Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, UK )
                2513-843X
                2019
                23 May 2019
                : 1
                : e2
                Affiliations
                [1]Department of Anthropology, University of Zürich , Winterthurerstrasse 190, 8057 Zürich, Switzerland
                Author notes
                [* ]Corresponding author: caroline.schuppli@ 123456aim.uzh.ch
                Author information
                https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6318-2815
                https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5738-4509
                Article
                S2513843X1900001X 00001
                10.1017/ehs.2019.1
                10427297
                37588402
                a34ac6b1-971f-4275-96df-48648e86e7b4
                © The Author 2019

                This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

                History
                Page count
                Figures: 4, References: 87, Pages: 13
                Categories
                Review

                culture,social learning,method of exclusion,orangutans,animal cultural repertoires

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