Animal Culture: The Importance Of Human Culture

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In most time, culture is regarded as the product of human work. It could be the reason why the word “Culture” originates from Latin meaning farming. Interestingly, some researchers believe that culture is not the only possession of mankind because it seems to exist in animals as well after investigating their cultural behaviors. With the rapid development of anthropology and other related disciplines, scholars can gradually tell the difference between animal and human cultures and even generalize why human culture is quite unique. Therefore, when animal culture is in debate, it is usually judged much strictly from a human culture perspective as Laland and Hoppitt (2003:150) believed. This essay will argue that chimpanzees do not have their own culture at present even though there are evidences can show they are capable of social learning, and it is not clearly indicated that the variations in group behaviours are directly caused by socially transmitted cultural learning. …show more content…

According to Laland and Hoppitt (2003:151), culture is mainly about the socially learned and transmitted behaviours in a certain group; however, more and more social scientists find that culture is too complicated to give a perfect and reasonable definition (2003:151). Boesch and Tomasello (1998:591) point out that culture is suggested to be viewed as an evolutionary process rather than an actual thing. Ironically, it seems that working on humans’ own culture cannot satisfy them so that they tend to figure out if culture exists in other biological populations. This also could be regarded as a good sign that humans are continually exploring their knowledge about evolution in connection with other species especially some hominid species like

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