The Cultural Capacity of Human and Nonhuman Primates: Social Learning, Innovation, and Cumulative Cultural Evolution

Whether the foundations of nonhuman and human traditions are fundamentally similar, or whether they are different, has been the subject of heated debate even referred to as the animal “culture wars.” In this chapter we aim to explore the question of homology and analogy, between nonhuman and human culture, by examining what we mean by the term culture and whether, and to what extent, a number of core cultural components—innovation, social learning processes, transmission biases—are shared across the primate order. We end with the topic of cumulative culture—the ability to generate complex cultural traits by building upon existing behavior patterns, generation after generation—and explore whether nonhuman primates, such as humans, exhibit such cultural progress.