Chimpanzee Culture
From teaching tool use, to hunting techniques and complex social
customs — passed down through generations.
Orca Culture
From teaching young to hunt, to unique vocal dialects and
shared group customs — passed down through generations.
Human Culture
From shared meals to music, festivals, and rituals —
passed down through generations.
For decades, culture has been treated as a uniquely human, symbolic construct—an abstract container for language, art, and traditions.
This framing hides the fact that many cultural behaviors are grounded in general cognitive abilities shared across species. Orcas teach their young, maintain distinct vocal dialects, and follow group customs. Chimpanzees pass down hunting strategies, tool use, and complex social norms.
By redefining culture as socially learned group behavior transmitted and maintained across time, we gain a framework that is mechanistic, testable, and comparable across species—revealing culture as a biological continuum rather than a uniquely human.
Culture is often portrayed as a uniquely human hallmark, framed in symbolic and interpretive terms that lack mechanistic grounding and allow the concept to encompass almost anything. However, the species with the most cognitively elaborate cultures outside humans—chimpanzees and orcas—show that culture is not a human-exclusive construct, but a continuous process grounded in general cognitive scaffolds.
This perspective calls for a definition that is precise enough to be mechanistically testable while unified enough to apply universally across cultural phenomena. We therefore propose: culture is group behaviour transmitted and maintained across time, supported by two continuous spectra of cognitive substrates: (1) individual-level social learning, from simple imitation to explicit teaching, and (2) group-level processes, from non-inferential matching to structured, intentional transmission.
We further show that species with greater cognitive capacities occupy broader ranges on these spectra, engaging in more complex and cognitively demanding cultural behaviours. This framework replaces symbolic assumptions with mechanistic structure, offering a unified account of cultural stability, variation, and graded complexity across contexts.
Culture — group behaviour transmitted and maintained across time.
Minimal & Unified
“Culture” has become a universal label—invoked to explain everything from political unrest to workplace habits. But when a term can cover any outcome, it stops revealing where the real causes lie.
This vagueness turns culture into a rhetorical tool rather than an analytical one, masking the specific mechanisms that shape behavior.
By redefining culture as a universal, mechanistic process, we create a framework that pinpoints where it operates, explains how it persists or changes, and makes it measurable across contexts.