Scientists thought for a long time that humans were the only species having culture. They then believed that our capacity to enhance such cultural knowledge throughout time made us special. Both of these ideas have now been shown to be false.
Animal culture has a strong and varied range of records. Over time, humpback whales create increasingly intricate songs that change and travel between groups. For thousands of years, chimpanzees have been passing on their unique understanding of how to utilise tools from one generation to the next.
Stanford University Professor Marcus Feldman and evolutionary anthropologist Thomas Morgan provide a novel theory: that "open-endedness"—the capacity to convey and comprehend an endless array of life's possibilities—is what makes humans special and dominant. "[...] when I'm making my boys' breakfast in the morning, it's a nested, multistep process [...] this whole thing is an elaborate procedure.” exemplified Morgan. When this system reaches its limit, our brains simply continue to function; we can create and remember extremely complex instructions, which enables us to carry out a nearly limitless range of actions—this is known as open-endedness. He suggests that while parental effects and epigenetic inheritance are both resilient and built up in non-human species, they inevitably cease to develop. "Just like animal cultures, there are constraints that these systems run-up against and that halt their evolution."
According to many social learning theories, new information can be culturally transferred after entering a community through individual interactions with the environment or trial-and-error learning. Exponential rates of cultural accumulation can also result from the creative fusion of preexisting traits to create new cultural traits. When various processes of innovation are interconnected, cultural characteristics may arise in periodic bursts: Numerous related breakthroughs and unique combinations can be facilitated by a revolutionary invention.
So, this is it, our capacity for creative and fluid problem-solving is what drives us to accumulate new skills and pass them down across several generations, thus refining our culture.
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