I enjoyed this paper. I like the idea of a “bottom up” analysis of animal culture.

Instead of assuming human culture is some kind of gold standard, we look instead at what is the smallest thing that can be called culture, across a few different axes, and build up from there.

In this minimalist view, any socially learned behavior has some cultural component. They make a pretty good case.

Lets assume dolphins are the smartest creatures on the planet.

How would they build an aqua farm? They can only hunt (or fish)

How could they paint? They can only nudge.

How could they do sign language? They can only squeak and flap.

They're stuck being nomads for life unless there's a better way to talk to them?

See below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25LYVxTUZhM

https://thebark.com/content/dogs-can-sign-too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc3iz-I6SYQ

How would they build an aqua farm? They can only hunt (or fish)

Farming arose in response to scarcity. Dolphins live in abundance and only take what they need. Humans horde.

How could they paint? They can only nudge.

In the sand.

How could they do sign language? They can only squeak and flap.

Why do they need to? Are any dolphins deaf? Regardless we don't know they can't. Perhaps they can see many details in their physical movements than we think are relevant.

Farming allows focus on other activities such as tech development.

They can paint in the sand that easily disappears? I'm talking about permanent pieces of art tho.

The point of understanding dolphins is so that they communicate in true language. Now it is possible that they are, see youtube link above about understanding rat squeaks.

They are also unable to harness fire or combustion... arguably a prerequisite of civilization and the easiest way to acquire/use exosomatic energy.

Given that they're not destroying the planet -and themselves with it- I'd give them at least the benefit of doubt.

Humans didn't really destroy the planet until the industrial revolution.

Also, if there's too many dolphins, there's starvation. Storing food would see them through.

> The complex and normative dimensions of culture seem unique to our species, but were most likely built upon a very broad, pre-existing cultural capacity that we inherited from our ancestors.

Not an expert here, but I am excited by the notion that this would also extend to tool use. (Tools being part of an animal's culture, after all.)

Absolutely yes. I’m excited too.

The hand axe dates back to 2.7 mya [1], which precedes homo sapiens (~350 kya) by > 2 million years. Our ancestors were probably homo erectus at that point.

We were gathering around campfires, cooking meat and sharing a meal ~1.9 mya [2], again likely homo erectus.

Lots of culture predates humanity, but humanity is such a gradient (thanks to evolution). It’s like we need a different word, broader than humanity, to describe our entire genetic history, all the way back to abiogenesis.

Then, instead of our identity being so homo-sapiens-centric, all about this bipedal smarty-pants, we could additionally identify as having been fish, and small scurrying mammals, and single celled organisms, and anything else our ancestors have “been” along our path. Anyone know of such a word?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_axe#History_and_distribut...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campfire#History

> humanity is such a gradient

In general I think there is a lot of scientific insight to be gained from gettting more comfortable with gradients, instead of insisting on distinct categories. I remember a conversation with a biologists who was complaining that with European bird subspecies the categories are more like a representation of national boundaries and their institutions, masking a gradient of change that happens across the continent.

Same with languages, especially before nation states were a thing.

I'm excited by any research that brings our understanding of animals closer to that of humans. Switching from human-centric (if it doesn't match how humans do it, must not exist) to species-first analysis over the past few decades is getting us closer.

Decoding the basics of an existing animal language is an inflection point I hope we hit soon, which should lead to regular discoveries. We almost always assume each individual exists in a vacuum; so much can be gained once a few verbal cues click.

> Department of Anthropology, University of Zürich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, 8057 Zürich, Switzerland

I guess it's an unusal conclusion to draw from the paper, but I certainly have learned something new, which is that there is a second university in Zürich next to the ETH. And it even seems to have more students than ETH, the largest in Switzerland in fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Zurich

This is the research I wish I was involved in

Do we confidently know that a squirrel isn't an actor of grandiose squirrel shenanigans but is actually just scraping around for food? Can we really quantify the number of our own cultural traits in an unbiased way? Would an alien observatory see us all just staring at blinking light screens, or would it know some people are playing Wii tennis while others are committing crimes?

This sentence is probably a good summary:

"Detecting animal culture irrespective of geographic variation is challenging and may not always be possible. "

Also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative

> grandiose squirrel shenanigans

Maybe not "grandiose", but squirrels are known to lie. They'll often pretend to be burying nuts in order to reduce the chance of surreptitious squirrel spies stealing the nuts they actually bury.

Ah you made this click for me. I had always failed to understand why squirrels would do this. Faking hiding a nut doesn’t feel like a productive use of energy even if other squirrels are watching. But if it is mutually understood that all squirrels are going to pretend to bury nuts n% of the time, it becomes less valuable for other squirrels to spy on you to begin with!

I wonder if the squirrel burying meta changes across generations. That is, when squirrels feel confident that nobody would bother spying, they waste less time pretending to bury nuts, which over time leads to more advantage from spying again, and thus requiring more deception.

The article mentions geographic variation as one of the easiest means to analyze animal cultures. If you hang onto that, it seems quite a bit is possible.

The article is about not hanging on to that, however.

Do we really want to see more of the iceberg and see how badly we keep hitting it though the countless genocides and systems of torture?

I don't think so, no.

Wouldn’t seeing more of the problem force people to confront their behavior?

I'm confused, to what "countless genocides and systems of torture" are you referring?

I will acknowledge that there have been genocides and tortures against practically every group of humans in the past, but I don't see how that is relevant.

I’m guessing they’re talking about things like factory farming, habitat destruction, hunting to extinction, etc. Genocide is the wrong word there and probably responsible for the downvotes, but “systems of torture” is depressingly accurate.

from implicit assumptions to a cultural premise: a cambridge case study