Why is human culture -; the shared body of knowledge passed down across generations -; so much more powerful than animal cultures? "What's special about our species?" is a question scientists have wrestled with for centuries, and now a scientist at Arizona State University has a new hypothesis that could change the way we perceive ourselves, and the world around us. "Ten years ago it was basically accepted that it was the ability of human culture to accumulate and evolve that made us special, but new discoveries about animal behavior are challenging these ideas and forcing us to rethink what makes our cultures, and us as a species, unique" said evolutionary anthropologist Thomas Morgan in a new research paper published this week in Nature Human Behavior. Morgan is a research scientist with the Institute of Human Origins and associate professor with the School of Human Evolution and Social Change.
Just as humans pass on knowledge to our children, when a new queen leafcutter ant hatches, she collects a little mouthful of her mother's fungus and takes it with her to start a new colony. This has been happening for so long -; millions of years -; that the fungus within these colonies is genetically different from the wild fungus outside of the colonies. Similar to how human languages change, new data shows that humpback whale songs evolve, spread between groups and become more complex over time.
Like humans, chimpanzees learn to use tools and we now have evidence that they have be.
