This is not to say that both forms of behavioral inheritance-the one traveling across time via genotypes, the other via phenotypes-should not or could not be conceptually linked. Ironically, the Lamarckian idea that acquired characteristics can be inherited has found its realization not in the physical characteristics he was thinking of, but in behavior. Genetic predispositions feed into culture, culture affects survival, and survival and reproduction determine which genotypes spread in the population. In other words, there exists a dauntingly complex interplay between genetic and cultural transmission. Brave and inspiring attempts at a theory of dual inheritance, or coevolution, have been made, without, however, in any way confusing the two processes.20'
In the meantime, the chief task for ethologists and zoologists is to show that dual inheritance is not limited to our species. Apart from the already mentioned studies of cultural learning, which concentrate on the individual and its habits, a second major approach has been to compare entire groups or communities. Since this approach resembles ethnography, or cultural anthropology, the field is increasingly referred to as cultural primatology. But perhaps we should find a different term that looks beyond the primates, such as "cultural biology."202 I have already mentioned rats and orcas, and there are countless other nonprimate examples, from the elephants in a desolate part of Namibia that have a collective, perhaps centuries-old, knowledge of a barely accessible watering hole in the mountains203 to the food wars between bears and people in the American wilderness.
In the old days, people could protect their food by simply hanging it from a rope in a tree. Bears have caught on to this, and to more elaborate techniques, such as those involving two ropes on two trees with the food suspended between them. Bear-proof steel boxes are now recommended. Cars don't make for good boxes, as shown by bears specializing in certain car brands to get their paws on human food. They know that the windshields of certain vans can be pulled out, and that if they jump up and down on the roof of some compacts the doors pop open. These solutions seem to spread like wildfire through bear populations in a way suggestive of cultural learning.
I am convinced that the more we look for culture in animals, the more we will find it. The latest exciting finding is that of a population of capuchin monkeys-the most dexterous monkey species, with exceptionally large brains-in the Tiete Ecological Park in Brazil that cracks nuts with stones in a manner not unlike chimpanzees.204 One day we will wonder why such an obvious idea as social transmission of knowledge and habits has taken so long to be taken seriously. Among primatologists, an obstacle has been that each field-worker has his or her own research site, often associated with a strong sense of pride, as in "My monkeys live in the harshest environment" or "My chimpanzees are smarter than yours." There is nothing wrong with this, except that the usual competitiveness of academics (because there is so little at stake, as the saying goes) hampers free information flow. Thus, some scientists have worked side by side a short distance apart for decades without ever visiting each other.
The first to set up an ethnographic program among chimpanzee researchers was McGrew, who, with his usual attention to detail, compared reports about different technologies at various African sites and began to visit colleagues to see things for himself. According to some, his conclusions- summarized in Chimpanzee Material Culture-should have shaken the social sciences to their roots, but they didn't. Not that his work went unnoticed; it opened the eyes of many of us to the hidden treasures lurking behind the patient chimpanzee research of the past decades, and McGrew was honored with a major prize.205
Things happened rapidly after that, with a first collection of papers on the topic, Chimpanzee Cultures, published in 1994, and finally a grand systematic survey of cultural variants in wild chimpanzees put together by Andrew Whiten and eight other authors appearing in Nature in 1999.206 The latter brought cultural primatology to the attention of the public outside of our little discipline and also taught us how much there is to be gained from collaboration. Perhaps this paper will permanently alter our own culture!
The evidence in the Nature article, drawn from an accumulated 151 years of research at seven different field sites, included behavior patterns never published before. For example, some populations fish for ants with short sticks, eating the prey off the stick one by one, whereas at least one population has developed the more efficient technique of accumulating many ants on a long wand, after which all insects are swept with a single hand motion right into the mouth. After compilation of a first list, variants were rated on a scale from customary to absent at each site, with its ecology taken into account. For example, chimpanzees will not sleep in ground nests-as opposed to tree nests-at sites with high leopard or lion predation. Such ecologically explained differences were excluded from the list.207 What remained were no less than thirty-nine distinct behavior patterns-far more than reported for any other animal -that vary across chimpanzee communities.
It is hard to imagine that genes would instruct apes how to fish for ants, or whether or not to make cushy seats out of vegetation. In addition, the authors found no evidence that habits vary more between than within the three existing chimpanzee subspecies. All in all, the evidence is now overwhelming that chimpanzees have a remarkable ability to invent new customs and technologies, and that they pass these on socially rather than genetically.
If animal groups vary with respect to a single behavior, such as potato washing, there is perhaps not much reason to employ a loaded term such as "culture"; "group-specific trait" or "tradition" will do. The claim has been made that chimpanzees differ from other animals in that, rather than having one or two cultural variants to go around, they have many. But I would be careful about putting the chimpanzee on a pedestal, even though there is no doubt in my mind that this species is and will remain central in any discussion of animal culture. Nevertheless, the other great apes, whales, dolphins, elephants, and many other long-lived, large-brained animals are also excellent candidates for multifaceted cultures. For example, whales sing complex songs with geographically distinct dialects. They also have elaborate hunting techniques that may be culturally learned, such as when humpbacks envelop schools of prey by clouds of bubbles. A recent study by Hal Whitehead suggests that sperm-whale mothers pass on feeding techniques and antishark defenses to their calves. He believes that some mothers are not only genetically but also culturally producing descendants that do better than others.20s
If true, this would be dual inheritance at work! There is every reason to believe that some animals have made the step in which the struggle for life is won, at least in part, by learning from others. They don't need to find out by themselves which predators are dangerous, how to gain access to good food, which foods to avoid, how to medicate themselves, and so on. They draw on the accumulated knowledge of their fainily and group. In this sense, they have made the same step from nature to culture that we claim for ourselves. But it should be clear by now that I feel this is the wrong way of putting it. Thinking of nature and culture as distinct and separate domains is tricky: there's plenty of nature in culture, just as there is plenty of culture in nature.
"But different as are the ways in which different cultures pattern the development of human beings, there are basic regularities that no known culture has yet been able to evade."
Margaret Mead, 1950
ea is a necessity of life in China. Everywhere, people carry around handheld containers with floating tea leaves, occasionally replenished with hot water so as to extract a second or third serving. Tea accompanies tourists to the Great Wall, farmers to the field, employees to work, and students to class. A hotel may fail to provide shampoo or towels, but every room will have a large thermos with hot water, porcelain cups with covers, and tea bags, so that guests can brew their own drinks.
The Chinese tea habit has been exported in somewhat modified fashion to other places, such as Japan, Russia, and the British Isles. However, the habit ultimately derives from the universal need of land anim
als to supply their bodies with water. People require H 20, and human culture does everything to ensure the intake: large-nippled bottles of mineral water for students on American college campuses, the absolute must of wine with Mediterranean food, and the feeling of the Dutch that even the shortest visit to someone's home is incomplete without a cup of coffee.
On a grander scale, the same applies to the thousands of cuisines and eating habits on this planet. Norbert Elias, the German sociologist for whom eating with fork and knife represented the pinnacle of refined self-control, once provoked an angry accusation of ethnocentrism from a Kenyan philosopher at an international meeting. The philosopher didn't consider himself any less civilized than Elias despite the fact that he, like millions of others in the world, ate with his hands.209 I had to think of this bourgeois theory of civilization in the face of the versatility and elegance of chopsticks. No confusing array of utensils adapted to every course, no risk of holding the wrong tool in the wrong hand: just two little sticks for everything, from rice to an entire fish!
Whatever the variability, and despite the symbolism surrounding food, there is no denying that we all need to eat, and that what our stomachs do with what we stuff into our mouths is the same as what animal stomachs do. Culture does have the power to go against human nature-with regard to ancient China, we only have to think of foot binding, eunuchism, and ascetic monks-but some of these practices serve to suppress particular groups, while others characterize only a minority. For a culture to survive, there is a limit to the number of genitals it can remove and feet it can deform. Although the relation between culture and nature can be tense, culture mostly tries to get along with nature, like the mouse with the elephant, because there is little doubt which is the heavyweight.
Shared Humanity
In cultural studies, basic human needs are often taken for granted; they are obvious to the point of being boring. Hence the immense common ground among cultures tends to be overlooked, and differences are blown out of proportion.
I am not saying that cultural variation is a figment of the imagination or hard to see. As a trained observer and a European, I can tell a German and French family apart from a kilometer away by their demeanor and body language. But at the same time both move around as families, the universal building block of human society. I cannot agree, therefore, with cultural determinists, such as Ashley Montagu, that "man has no instincts, because everything he is and has become he has learned, acquired, from his culture, from the man-made part of the environment, from other human beings."210 If culture really has such a profound impact, and if there really is so little that can be attributed to human biology, why do I have no trouble recognizing the gestures, facial expressions, and social relationships of the Chinese despite at least five thousand years of cultural separation from the West? Why aren't the differences more radical? The Forbidden City in Beijing-four times the size of Versailles and ten times that of Buckingham Palace-gives a good impression of how Chinese emperors used to rule from elaborate thrones designed to overlook the masses gathered on immense squares, intimidating them with their splendor. It is the same kind of formalized dominance known of European royalty of bygone eras, or for that matter of a chimpanzee alpha male, imperiously standing with his hair bristling, barely paying attention to his underlings, who crawl in the dust, approaching him with submissive pantgrunts.
Similarly, Chinese opera has all of the same intrigues, power plays, betrayals, jealousies, and illicit love affairs known of Italian opera, even though the costumes, acrobatics, and music are quite different. And in everyday Chinese life, there is abundant familiarity in the way children whine for attention, lovers stare into each other's eyes, a good joke causes instant joy, voices are raised in anger, and longtime spouses are in tune with each other.
In short, underneath all of those fascinating cultural differences to which we attach such great importance resides a shared humanity that makes even the most naive visitors feel at home in cultures across the globe. Rather than having landed on Mars, they are among people very much like themselves. The issue of culture always needs to be placed in this larger context of how it builds upon rather than replaces universal human tendencies. This is the oldest theme of biology-unity in diversity-and it applies to everything we consider, because the new is always constrained by the old from which it derives and with which it needs to harmonize. The same is true for animal culture, which expands behavioral possibilities and creates variety but always within a species' needs and nature.
Shared Macaqueness
Huang Shan (pronounced "fuan-sjan," meaning "yellow mountain") is the mountain of China, not because its 1,841 meters make it the highest peak, but because of its unsurpassed beauty. Huang Shan sticking its head out of a blanket of clouds figures in hundreds of paintings, some very famous.
Before seeing the mountains, however, my companions and I drive through gentle hills and valleys made fertile through irrigation schemes on the rivers. The rolling landscape and warm yellowish colors caused by the rows of drying rice plants remind me of the French countryside, even if the water buffaloes and large pointed straw heads of the farmers make it abundantly clear that I am someplace else.
Straddling the border between China's temperate and subtropical zones, Anhui province nowadays produces such a good rice crop that it is hard to imagine that in the 1960s people here were starving by the hundreds of thousands. It is estimated that in all of China, more than twenty million people paid with their lives for Mao's agricultural reforms. These reforms ignored the human tendency to work first of all for the family, and only secondarily for the greater good of society. Hard work comes a lot easier when it feeds hungry mouths at horse than hungry mouths elsewhere. Cooperatives established under communism can then be said to have been in stark violation of human nature. The economic and ultimately political failure of this doctrine in the Soviet Union, China, and elsewhere is a large-scale illustration of the limited power of cultural revolutions. In human affairs, there are certain things that cannot be touched. This is what Edward Wilson meant when he said that human nature keeps us on a leash: we do have maneuvering room, but it is finite.
I am visiting this place not to reflect on the foibles of communism, however, nor to indulge in a sense of shared humanity, but to see a rare primate, the Tibetan macaque. Here is an opportunity to test for shared macaqueness, as I am wellacquainted with other members of the genus Macaca. This genus counts approximately twenty different species, ranging from the rhesus monkeys of India and Nepal to the Barbary monkeys of North Africa, to the snow monkeys of Japan. The largest macaque of all, however, dwells here in the mountain forests, Macaca
The species is found in a small number of scattered locations in Tibet and other parts of China. Only an estimated 450 of them live in this, the eastern part of its range. A monkey park has been set up where tourists can watch one group of around thirty monkeys attracted by regular feedings. The method of provisioning is critically important, as these monkeys have been known to kill tourists; at another site, Mount Emei, Tibetan macaque males have jumped people who crossed a narrow path along the rocks. Hitting them with their full muscle mass, they have sent several people down the precipice to their death.
Aggression against humans is mostly related to frustration when begging for food isn't rewarded. At other places, such as at Indonesian or Thai temples, I have seen long-tailed macaques threaten people, even jump on their shoulders and pull their hair, but those monkeys are so much lighter, and the footing is so much more secure, that these attacks are not lethal. The solution is to control feeding. If monkeys have no reason to search people's pockets and intimidate them, a lot of problems are avoided. Here at Huang Shan, the monkeys receive food only from park wardens.
Our little excursion is lead by Jinhua Li, a Chinese researcher who has spent the last ten years studying the monkeys. He works not just at the park, but also in the wild parts of the mountains. Following the monkeys is an almost impossible task given t
hat they race up and down the steep rocks like mountain goats, leaving the clumsy human to carefully select his way through dense undergrowth. Li is obviously in tip-top physical shape. He talks incessantly while the rest of us struggle out of breath to the top, climbing endless flights of wooden stairs.
It is late summer, and the monkeys are not overly eager to come to the site. The forest is full of mushrooms, nuts, and berries-no need to hurry for the handouts of corn that the bipedal primates scatter around. When they finally do show up, they are truly impressive. I can see why decades ago people of this region thought they had seen the Yeti when they ran into an adult male of the species. Myths abound: they live in caves, bury their dead, are led by the oldest, and so on. Their flat, broad, bearded faces provide perhaps the most humanlike countenance I have ever seen in a monkey. They are clearly monkeys, though, not members of our immediate family. In sharp contrast to humans and apes, for example, they scratch their backs with a foot, like a dog. They also don't have the wide chest and protruding shoulders typical of the hominoids. And most tellingly, they have tails, albeit rather short ones.
The Ape And The Sushi Master Reflections Of A Primatologist Page 21