ReviewEvolutionary human sciences2019
Animal cultures: how we've only seen the tip of the iceberg.
Review in Evolutionary human sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 44 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
44 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Knowledge transmission, culture and the consequences of social disruption in wild elephants.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Pooled it
- Freedom of choice supports social complexity in chimpanzees.iScience · 2026Article
- Chimpanzee culture beyond the conspicuous: Evidence for broad-scale observational social learning in wild individuals.iScience · 2026Article
- The flexible, the stereotyped and the in-between: putting together the combinatory tool use origins hypothesis.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Article
- Geophagy in Gibraltar Barbary macaques is a primate tradition anthropogenically induced.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The evolution of the concepts of 'primate culture' in Western science.Primates; journal of primatology · 2026Review
- Animal cultures matter for conservation, but also to animals.Learning & behavior · 2026Review
- Culture is critical in driving orangutan diet development past individual potentials.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Cosmovision as Cognitive Technology: The Case of Mesoamerican Medicinal Knowledge.Topics in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Not by Selection Alone: Expanding the Scope of Gene-Culture Coevolution.Evolutionary anthropology · 2025Review
- Insect applications to open wounds by chimpanzees in the wild: first insights from East African chimpanzees.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Mapping nonhuman cultures with the Animal Culture Database.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Observational social learning of "know-how" and "know-what" in wild orangutans: evidence from nest-building skill acquisition.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Integrating culture into primate conservation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- The growing methodological toolkit for identifying and studying social learning and culture in non-human animals.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Article
- Social tolerance and role model diversity increase tool use learning opportunities across chimpanzee ontogeny.Communications biology · 2025Article
- The development of social attention in orangutans: Comparing peering behavior in wild and zoo-housed individuals.iScience · 2025Article
- The extent of western lowland gorilla social relationships within and between groups.PloS one · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
For humans we implicitly assume that the way we do things is the product of social learning and thus cultural. For animals, this conclusion requires proof. Here, we first review the most commonly used procedure for documenting animal culture: the method of exclusion, which charts geographic behavioral variation between populations as evidence for culture. Using published data, we show that, whereas it is an adequate proof of principle, the method of exclusion has major deficiencies when capturing cultural diversity and complexity. Therefore, we propose a new method, namely the direct counting of socially learned skills, which we apply to previously collected data on wild orangutans. This method reveals a far greater cultural repertoire among orangutans, and a different distribution of cultural elements among behavioral domains than found by the method of exclusion, as well as clear ecological correlates for most cultural elements. The widespread occurrence of social learning ability throughout the animal kingdom suggests that these conclusions also apply to many other species. Culture is most likely more widespread and pervasive than commonly thought and an important avenue to local adaptation. 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.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.