Customs and cultures in animals and humans

Abstract

Anthropologists have long considered culture to be a defining attribute of humanity. Over the last decade, however, primatologists have repeatedly asserted that great apes also possess culture. Whether or not great apes or other animals pass the `culture test' depends on how one defines culture. This article uses the terms `custom' and `symbolic culture' to distinguish socially transmitted behavioral patterns and symbolic systems of belief, each of which is sometimes called culture. Information presented here indicates that social customs are widespread among mammals. It remains questionable, however, whether any non-human animals possess symbolic cultures. Symbolism, teaching, imitation, speech, and gesture demand brain-size mediated neurological capacities possessed by few non-human species. These include fine motor skills and the ability to construct variable, complex motor acts, concepts, and objects from multiple components. Humans exceed all other animals in these mental constructional skills and, hence, in many abilities that rely upon them including language, making complex tools, art, dance, mime, teaching and imitation. These interacting capacities enhance our social learning abilities and also allow us to create and transmit symbolic systems of belief. Symbolic cultures, thus, may be creations of social beings equipped with prerequisite motor and mental capacities, and they may reflect activities of multiple neurological areas as opposed to being a discrete human trait mediated by a specific, genetically-determined neural module. To the extent that symbolic cultures are creations, all mental capacities essential for culture may have been present in ancestral humans prior to the appearance of actual evidence of culture in the archaeological record.