What Constitutes Non-Human Culture and How Is It Studied?

Abstract

All human societies have socially transmitted knowledge and behaviour, which makes culture a human universal. However, cultural variation has also been found among a variety of other species, suggesting that culture is a phylogenetic continuum and/or has evolved independently in multiple lineages. In this chapter, the authors provide an overview of the conceptual foundations and the tools used to detect and quantify animal culture. Over the last decades, carefully designed experiments in the wild and laboratory have shed light on the cultural capacity of numerous species. Tools to detect animal culture in nature include systematically charting geographic behavioural variation, counting instances of social learning, and reconstructing the spread of cultural variants through populations. Together, these methods showed that culture pervades the lives of animals of a far wider variety of taxa than previously assumed, spans a large range of behavioural domains, and includes behavioural elements of all levels of complexity.