Humans are not that special: animals also have local culture and traditions

There are chimpanzees that wounds are healed with medicinal herbs. Meerkats have local traditions depending on the group to which they belong, just like the Argentine parrots, which In Madrid they nest in cedars, but in Barcelona they prefer palm trees. Humpback whales learn songs that they modify, sperm whales vary their dialect depending on the area, and orcas coordinate to produce the waves that cause seals to fall off the ice floes. Even invertebrates acquire knowledge and transmit it to their communities. For example, Fruit flies tell their offspring their sexual preferences.

The animal kingdom is full of fascinating examples that demonstrate that culture is not exclusive to humans. It all depends, of course, on what we mean by culture. There's an empirical definition: "An individual who innovates finds this discovery useful, and they repeat it. Others see it and, through some kind of social learning, they learn it, and it becomes established. When they reproduce, this behavior is passed on to the next generation, usually through their mothers," explains Montserrat Colell, a researcher specializing in ethology at the University. This means that "populations living in different places have their own traditions."

In fact, one of the first to establish this concept was Jordi Sabater Pi, one of the most universal Catalan scientists, a pioneering ethologist who spoke about chimpanzee culture in the 1970s—popularly known for carrying Snowflake at the Barcelona Zoo. "Historically, for religious and ideological reasons, attempts have been made to isolate humans from other animals by citing behavioral traits such as language, self-awareness, and culture, but we must not forget that all living beings are part of the same biological continuum," Colell points out.

Teach, learn

Within the framework of the conditions of innovation, social learning, and generational transmission, innovation is unquestionable, and even more so with climate change, points out Joan Carles Senar, researcher at the Museum of Natural Sciences of Barcelona and vice president of the Spanish Society of Ethology.

"We have put them to another, they have to adapt," he explains. This is the case of the Argentine parakeet in Barcelona, ​​​​to which he has dedicated some of his research, which has changed its behavior since arriving in the 1980s.

On the other hand, social learning has not always been scientifically proven; they learned by themselves individually thanks to latent knowledge. Josep Call, Professor of Evolutionary Origins of Mind at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, specializing in primate cognition, has participated, along with researcher Edwin van Leuween, in one of the most revealing primate studies on the subject published in Nature Human BehaviorThe research involved placing a kind of box in which if you inserted a wooden ball, a reward would be ejected, some kind of food that was appetizing to the apes.

For three months, the chimpanzees couldn't figure out their mechanism on their own, but after the researchers assigned one chimpanzee from each group to solve the box's puzzle, they were able to transfer the knowledge to the others. "We were able to see that they learn behavior socially, which they can't innovate on their own," Call explains.

Nonhuman animals not only have culture, but "it's vital for some species," says Luke Rendell, also a researcher at St. Andrews but who specializes in marine mammals. "Individuals can't develop to become fully functioning members of their societies without significant amounts of cultural input, similar to how we imagine a human deprived of cultural input during childhood would become a very troubled adult," he says.

Together with biologist Hal Whitehead, this ethologist has collected countless examples that demonstrate this, such as the different migratory routes taken by the humpback whale population and that the young learn by following their mothers or food-searching strategies, such as tail-flicking or tail-waving.

No Rodoredes or Beethovens in the animal kingdom

From an anthropocentric perspective, we might think that although they have their own culture, it has nothing to do with ours, which we usually associate with arts like writing or music. Why, then, do these chimpanzees or sperm whales, who innovate and transmit their knowledge, not compose melodies or write books?

Their culture may not have evolved like ours because they do not have cumulative culture, a concept that implies the improvement of learned behavior from generation to generation, the researchers point out. Thus, not even Mercè Rodoreda would have written Diamond Square not even Beethoven would have composed the Ninth Symphony on a desert island, because they did so thanks to the cumulative culture that preceded them.

And why aren't they capable of improving? The main reason for consensus is brain size. Impar, a researcher at the Barcelona Museum of Natural Sciences. Furthermore, sociability is key to the growth of this organ, for example, The more they interact, the more vocal repertoire they have., the researcher states, adding that "to live in society, you need cognitive skills to understand what's happening to others." Therefore, several factors give each species a dominant characteristic, and, for Impar, just as the peregrine falcon is a champion in speed, humans are a champion in culture.

Investigations continue in this regard and point towards incipient traits of cumulative culture in primates, marked—as in humans—by the exchange between populations that gives rise to more complex tools. "It seems there is an improvement, but it's cautious and slow. This happens with chimpanzees because females leave their natal group to avoid incest and take their cultural baggage with them. The individual who joins another group can contribute behaviors to established traditions and improve them," explains the ethologist at the UB.

The difficulty lies in monitoring these innovative behaviors to see how they evolve. "We're in our infancy. We need more time," admits this researcher. Fortunately, researchers aren't starting from scratch. Isaac Newton quotes: "We ride on the shoulders of giants." It's precisely thanks to cumulative culture that science can go ever further.

Stop navel-gazing

Not only culture, but there is evidence that animals have self-awareness or that they can plan for the future, as is the case of the crowsSo why do we still believe we have more abilities? "Humans have a bias that is to think we are fantastic and unique. When you scratch the surface, you see that the differences are not so great," says Call, "that we think make us unique."

And studying primates "is like having living models," since they help us understand the evolutionary origins of our behavior in more primitive species than Homo sapiens or in the Australopithecus, explains Colell. The researcher rejects androcentrism—"it's not like a ladder with humans at the top"—and warns that we should be concerned about their well-being, even if it's selfish, because "we would know very little about ourselves without them."

For her part, Impar calls for protecting the ecological balance without falling into "the danger of animalism, which only sees individuals and ignores the relationship between animals within the ecosystem." "Weeds are plants we don't benefit from, but butterflies and other animals do. So why are they weeds?" asks the researcher, who calls for dissemination and enthusiasm: "To know is to love."