Animals Taught Us Culture

This article proposes a premise based on yet another variety of human exceptionalism, which it purports to eschew: that somehow we evolved and existed in a kind of existential vacuum, apart from animals and nature in our identity even while utterly enmeshed in the natural environment.

It’s ridiculous.

Animals and humans have cultures. Many animals are intelligent enough to create some form of language, many quite advanced. If a group of animals has a mutable language, that is inherently an artifact of culture.

We did not learn culture from animals. We had culture long before we were “human”, picking it up along the way alongside other species as our brains developed sufficient complexity to support mutable symbolic communication.