Animal cultures: how we've only seen the tip of the iceberg
cambridge.org
cambridge.org
Instead of assuming human culture is some kind of gold standard, we look instead at what is the smallest thing that can be called culture, across a few different axes, and build up from there.
In this minimalist view, any socially learned behavior has some cultural component. They make a pretty good case.
How would they build an aqua farm? They can only hunt (or fish)
How could they paint? They can only nudge.
How could they do sign language? They can only squeak and flap.
They're stuck being nomads for life unless there's a better way to talk to them?
See below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25LYVxTUZhM
Also, if there's too many dolphins, there's starvation. Storing food would see them through.
Farming arose in response to scarcity. Dolphins live in abundance and only take what they need. Humans horde.
How could they paint? They can only nudge.
In the sand.
How could they do sign language? They can only squeak and flap.
Why do they need to? Are any dolphins deaf? Regardless we don't know they can't. Perhaps they can see many details in their physical movements than we think are relevant.
They can paint in the sand that easily disappears? I'm talking about permanent pieces of art tho.
The point of understanding dolphins is so that they communicate in true language. Now it is possible that they are, see youtube link above about understanding rat squeaks.
Not an expert here, but I am excited by the notion that this would also extend to tool use. (Tools being part of an animal's culture, after all.)
The hand axe dates back to 2.7 mya [1], which precedes homo sapiens (~350 kya) by > 2 million years. Our ancestors were probably homo erectus at that point.
We were gathering around campfires, cooking meat and sharing a meal ~1.9 mya [2], again likely homo erectus.
Lots of culture predates humanity, but humanity is such a gradient (thanks to evolution). It’s like we need a different word, broader than humanity, to describe our entire genetic history, all the way back to abiogenesis.
Then, instead of our identity being so homo-sapiens-centric, all about this bipedal smarty-pants, we could additionally identify as having been fish, and small scurrying mammals, and single celled organisms, and anything else our ancestors have “been” along our path. Anyone know of such a word?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_axe#History_and_distribut...
In general I think there is a lot of scientific insight to be gained from gettting more comfortable with gradients, instead of insisting on distinct categories. I remember a conversation with a biologists who was complaining that with European bird subspecies the categories are more like a representation of national boundaries and their institutions, masking a gradient of change that happens across the continent.
Same with languages, especially before nation states were a thing.
Decoding the basics of an existing animal language is an inflection point I hope we hit soon, which should lead to regular discoveries. We almost always assume each individual exists in a vacuum; so much can be gained once a few verbal cues click.
I guess it's an unusal conclusion to draw from the paper, but I certainly have learned something new, which is that there is a second university in Zürich next to the ETH. And it even seems to have more students than ETH, the largest in Switzerland in fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Zurich
This sentence is probably a good summary:
"Detecting animal culture irrespective of geographic variation is challenging and may not always be possible. "
Maybe not "grandiose", but squirrels are known to lie. They'll often pretend to be burying nuts in order to reduce the chance of surreptitious squirrel spies stealing the nuts they actually bury.
I wonder if the squirrel burying meta changes across generations. That is, when squirrels feel confident that nobody would bother spying, they waste less time pretending to bury nuts, which over time leads to more advantage from spying again, and thus requiring more deception.
I don't think so, no.
I will acknowledge that there have been genocides and tortures against practically every group of humans in the past, but I don't see how that is relevant.