Culture Beyond Homo sapiens

elective courses

Students with a good command of English (B2 or better) are welcome to enrol.

This course is intended for students willing to challenge traditional ways of thinking about the difference between humans and other animals. Since the course offers a bulk of selected readings, students must be prepared to find time for self-study.

The class will explore the evidence for culture in non-human animals, and investigate the characteristics of species which encourage the development of social learning and traditions.

This class will examine the evidence for culture in non-human animals, and explore the contentious debate as to whether non-human traditions are comparable to human ones. Questions will be asked such as: Is language a pre-requisite for human-type culture? Does culture depend on the presence in a species of certain specific behaviors, such a teaching and imitation, or can it arise out of lower-level cognitive processes? Definitions of culture will be critically examined, and we will investigate theories as to why culture-like behavior is more likly to appear in some taxa but not others. Finally, we will delve into the implications that non-human culture has on the evolution of our own human way of being, with a particular focus on our closest cousins the great apes.

A list of topics

1. Evidence of culture in non-human animals

2. Towards a reasonable and non-anthropocentric operational definition of culture

3. Culture in non-humans? A debate between psychologists and field primatologists

4. What traits in animals favor an increased reliance on social learning?

Students will be asked to come up with and defend definitions of culture. A class debate will be held with some students taking the ‘psychologist’ position that culture is uniquely human and others defending the ‘field primatologist’ position that it is shared with other animals. Point-counterpoint articles in the debate will be read and debated. A major feature of the class will be to have students identify unconscious assumptions many have made about ‘human exceptionalism’.

Boesch, Christophe. Wild cultures: a comparison between chimpanzee and human cultures. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Boesch, Christophe. "Taking development and ecology seriously when comparing cognition: Reply to Tomasello and Call (2008)." (2008): 453.

(and related exchange)

Fragaszy, Dorothy M., and Susan Perry, eds. The biology of traditions: models and evidence. Cambridge University Press, 2008.

McGrew, William Clement. Chimpanzee material culture: implications for human evolution. Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Tennie, Claudio, Josep Call, and Michael Tomasello. "Ratcheting up the ratchet: on the evolution of cumulative culture." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 364.1528 (2009): 2405-2415.

van Schaik, Carel P., Robert O. Deaner, and Michelle Y. Merrill. "The conditions for tool use in primates: implications for the evolution of material culture." Journal of Human Evolution 36.6 (1999): 719-741.

After completing this class, students should be able to:

1. Critically analyse competing definitions of ‘culture’, historical and modern, and provide compelling arguments why or why not this phenomenon should be expanded to include animals other than humans.

2. Provide examples of potential culture in non-humans, and describe how they are different and how they are similar to human cultures.

3. Analyse behavioral, ecological and ontogenetic features found in certain species of animals which promote the social transmission of knowledge, and potentially the evolution of culture.

4. Achieve an understanding of the issues in the debate between psychologists and field primatologists. How important is a precise elucidation of underlying behavioral mechanism in claims for animal culture? What are the advantages and limitations of studying this phenomenon in a. captive animals, and b. free-living ones?

Multiple choice quizzes and essay tests, plus one large research paper on a particular topic