crunchysupreme
Re:Animal cultures: how we've only seen the tip of the iceberg
on Tuesday May 21, 2019 @12:30AM (#19967572)
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. "