Culture

David Attenborough explaining what culture means, in his book A Life on Our Planet, from the perspective an evolutionary biologist.

To an evolutionary biologist, the term ‘culture’ describes the information that can be passed from one individual to another by teaching or imitation. Copying the ideas or actions of others seems to us to be easy – but that is because we excel at it. Only a handful of other species show any signs of having a culture. Chimpanzees and bottle-nosed dolphins are two of them. But no other species has anything approaching the capacity for culture that we have.

Culture transformed the way we evolved. It was a new way by which our species became adapted for life on Earth. Whereas other species depended on physical changes over generations, we could produce an idea that brought significant change within a genera-tion. Tricks such as finding the plants that yield water even during a drought, crafting a stone tool for skinning a kill, lighting a fire or cooking a meal, could be passed from one human to another during a single lifetime. It was a new form of inheritance that didn’t rely on the genes which an individual received from its parents.

So now the pace of our change increased. Our ancestors’ brains expanded at extraordinary speed, enabling us to learn, store and spread ideas. But, ultimately, the physical changes in their bodies slowed almost to a halt. By some 200,000 years ago, anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens – people like you and me – had appeared. We have changed physically very little since then. What has changed spectacularly is our culture.