Anthropologists don't always agree on the definition of culture. The famous British scholar Lord Raglan called culture, "everything that man does that the monkeys do not." The Oxford dictionary keeps it simple: "the attitudes and behavior characteristic of a particular social group." Robert Foley, a Cambridge paleoanthropologist, has highlighted a much broader (brain-hurting) definition, writing:[Culture] is often both the explanation of what it is that has made human evolution different and what it is that it is necessary to explain. It is at once part of our biology and the thing that sets the limits on biological approaches and explanations. Just to add further confusion to the subject, it is also that which is universally shared by all humans and, at the same time, the word used to demarcate differences between human societies and groups. As if this were not enough for any hard-worked concept, it is both a trait itself and also a process.If all this isn't confusing enough, most anthropologists, including Foley himself, disagree with the Lord Raglan definition (assuming the Lord was calling all other primates "monkeys"): Apes, they argue, have culture too. If the definition of culture is reduced to some logical foundation, which is probably something like the Oxford dictionary one above, then, the argument goes, many apes certainly have cultural practices in their "particular social groups."A recent study by Lydia V. Luncz, Roger Mundry, and Christophe Boesch, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany makes a strong case for a particular form of localized chimp culture. In the report, published in the newest issue of Current Biology, Luncz et al show that several groups of chimps in a forest in Ivory Coast use stone and wood "hammers" to crack open flavorsome coula nuts. Furthermore, different groups use tools in their own specific patterns, and these patterns are most accurately explained by cultural transmission:We have documented differences in hammer choice within a single forest block, with members of three different adjacent chimpanzee communities that are in regular contact with one another and thus are not genetically differentiated. …Community dependent behavioral uniformity of tool selection in neighboring communities suggests a cultural transmission process…The study focuses on two details of chimpanzee tool use that suggest chimp culture: First, as mentioned above, a genetic explanation for chimps deciding on either stone or wood tools doesn't work well, as the three crews had much intermingling and immigration, and, it follows, shared genes. Second, because they were in the same "forest block," the environmental differences that could explain stone vs. wood tool use (based on, say, the climate and resulting hardness of the nuts) are not significant. The choice of stone vs. wood nutcracker in the chimps is best explained by a cultural model — chimps were learning from their neighbors and actually forming conventions.Luncz, et al, continue:In this regard, chimpanzees show a strong similarity to humans, for whom ecology, genes, and cultural inheritance interact to produce a variety of different cultural solutions. It has generally been assumed that in humans, culture overwrites ecological and genetic influences on behavior, and that once it has evolved, it allows for more independence from ecological constraints. The results of the present study suggest that in wild chimpanzees, cultural practices can also to some extent overwrite ecological pressures, and that their cultural systems can be resilient.Conventional wisdom makes a big deal about the cultural gap that sets humans apart from apes – that giant chasm between nut-smashing and Beethoven.The most studied evidence of proto-human culture is the manipulation of stone tools, and the transmission of those techniques through huge spans of time – early human ancestors were making tools and teaching their kids and peers how to make them too. It seems like chimps are doing something similar today, minus the masonry.
Nut-smashing may not be voting or dancing, but it has the features of a cultural practice. And by this token, so does birdsong and tool use in dolphins. It turns out to be really hard to know when "culture" appeared in nature. Ethology has rendered another broad, "unique" "human trait" not unique. What's left?! Male pattern baldness?!
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