We all know the story. Give every chimpanzee on Earth a typewriter and wait until something monumental happens. Last year, mathematicians concluded that chimpanzees never achieve the former. Even the more modest “banana” in that lifetime could type even the more modest “banana” at 5%. The failure of some of our closest relatives tells us that this test is unparalleled in nature. But asking the biologist to explain why this is so, and things get complicated.
This issue became clear this century as studies have revealed that cultures are not unique, but rather exist across animal kingdoms, ranging from whales to ants. This encourages researchers to look for key ingredients that explain our culture and why we alone flourished.
That wasn’t easy. For surprisingly reason, animal culture is much more refined than we had envisioned. We once thought they couldn’t make more technological advances, but research published a few months ago suggests they can. They also suspected that animals lacked clever people to learn complex behaviors from one another, but last year they discovered that even bees could be brainy enough to do so. “Opinions have changed.” Edwin Van Lewenan animal cognition researcher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “We know a lot more about animals now than we have before.”
However, in updating our expectations for animal cultural behavior, we appear to have more difficult to explain cultural gaps.
Source: www.newscientist.com