Archaeologist Sarah Newman offers the thesis that, contrary to our assumptions, animals taught humans culture. She writes at Aeon:

Many millennia before spectacular figures of horses, mammoths, lions and other animals were painted (c17,000 years ago) on the walls of the famous Lascaux cave in the Dordogne region of southwestern France, hominin artists were dragging their fingers through soft clay, pecking and scratching simple lines and circles into rock, and rubbing and dotting cave walls with red ochre. These early marks were often placed around or atop the polished surfaces and claw marks left behind by cave bears, felines and other mammals. Sometimes the human marks imitate the forms of existing scratches or smoothing made by other species. Human art, then, is part of a broader tradition of animal mark-making.

At times, this ‘parietal art’ (the name for human-made art on cave or rock walls) is so similar to animal traces that archaeologists struggle to disentangle and distinguish one from the other. In the 1960s, for example, the French prehistorian Amédée Lemozi interpreted a series of engraved lines at Pech-Merle cave in the Occitania region of southern France as a representation of a masked and wounded shaman. Lemozi saw lines piercing the figure of the shaman and pecking intended to represent wounds, leading him to suggest that the shaman was depicted undergoing a ritual death. Lemozi’s ideas were taken up by the Belgian prehistorian Lya Dams in the mid-1980s and extended into a broader exploration of wounded men in Palaeolithic art. A few years later, however, the French prehistorian Michel Lorblanchet showed that the many crisscrossing lines making up the ‘wounded shaman’ on the calcite surface of the cave were, in fact, gashes in multiple directions left by the claws of cave bears. 

“Animals taught us culture”, June 13, 2025

This sounds like a conventional case of over-interpretation on the part of Lya Dams. Now, if someone could show that the bears depicted shamans undergoing a ritual death, Newman might have a point…

Many of the bear marks, beaver logs, and bison paths that incited new human behaviours come from a time when the divide between human and nonhuman was more porous, when humans were discovering how to be human. That process of discovery was less about our species defining itself against everything else in the world than it was about interactions, observations, mimicry, creativity and experimentation. 

“Animals taught us culture”

Overall, Newman’s thesis seems to depend on the view that only the vice of human exceptionalism would cause us to see the Lascaux cave drawings as something intrinsically different from claw marks or St. Peter’s Basilica as something intrinsically different from beaver dams. 

But they are; they involve abstractions. That chasm may appear narrow to some but it is deep. No doubt, humans learned a lot by watching animals but the critical fact is that we learned fundamentally different things.

A More Measured Look

Also at Aeon, University of Sydney evolutionary biologist Antone Martinho-Truswell provides a more measured look at humans, animals, and culture:

Culture and its transmission from generation to generation is the defining feature of humanity. It is perhaps the best candidate for the thing that separates us from other beasts. Though there are other species that have been shown to hand down accumulated knowledge — including chimps, who show some evidence for cultural transmission of tool-use — no other animal approaches our ability to layer breakthrough upon breakthrough in such a complex way, and certainly no other animal does it with the conscious intent to lift future communities beyond the achievements that came before. That is a human distinction if there ever were one. 

“Empire of flight,” June 17, 2025

So, he asks, why don’t intelligent birds do the same things? “Why do they not have a market economy, with not only goods for trade, but luxury goods whose value relies on concepts rather than raw usefulness. Why don’t birds drive Bentleys?” 

He goes into a detailed explanation of how Darwinian natural selection explains it all, provided that we see its peaks as valleys instead and assume that it operates somewhat like gravity.

For a species like ours, the valley is deep and wide, driving increasingly capable brains and increasingly complex sharing of information — and presumably, creating enough gravity to draw other species in.

That hasn’t occurred.

For reptiles, fish, amphibians, cephalopods and other groups, it is not terribly surprising that they haven’t fallen down the well of complex culture in the evolutionary landscape. Their constellation of traits actually places them rather far away, in their own local minima, with the gravitational effects of human-style culture felt only distantly, if at all.

“Empire of flight”

And still no Bentleys for the birds? Martinho-Truswell blames flight:

Flight is an evolutionary black hole. It is a gravitational well with no bottom, a trait so powerfully effective at improving survival and reproduction that it plunges a species into a well of easy life and high fitness from which there is no escape. Or, to return to more conventional evolutionary language, it relieves an incomparable amount of selection pressure that might drive a species to alternative traits.

“Empire of flight”

This all seems a roundabout way of saying that humans are exceptional. And here’s the question that no one in evolutionary biology has the answer to: What is the “it” that we have and birds don’t? The conundrum of human consciousness strikes again.

Cross-posted at Mind Matters News.