Life
Even animals with very small brains turn out to have cultural traditions, which poses a puzzler for biologists wondering what makes human culture unique
By Colin Barras
We all know the story: give every chimpanzee on the planet a typewriter and wait until something monumental occurs, either the recreation of the complete works of William Shakespeare or the heat death of the universe. Last year, mathematicians concluded the chimps would never achieve the former – the likelihood of one typing even the more modest “bananas” in its lifetime is a meagre 5 per cent. That some of our closest relatives fail this test speaks to how human culture is like nothing else in nature. Ask biologists to explain why this is, however, and things get complicated.
The problem…
