The Nature of Culture: Based on an Interdisciplinary Symposium ‘The Nature of Culture,’ Tübingen, Germany

T book is the result of an interdisciplinary symposium held in 2011 to explore the role that culture played in early human expansions. The symposium had two goals: first, to develop a unified theory of cultural evolution from data collected from great apes, sea mammals, and birds; and, second, to examine the nature of culture as defined by the social sciences and humanities. The evolution of cultural behavior is ultimately presented in terms of information flow, using individual ontogeny, archaeology, and ethology. The results are presented in twelve chapters, written almost exclusively by scholars from Europe, Israel, South Africa, and Australia. The editors summarize the major points in each chapter in an introduction that also presents the symposium’s contentious debate and final model of cultural evolution and intensification in cultural capacities—the EECC model. It is irritating that this acronym is nowhere explicitly defined in the book. It stands for the Evolution and Expansion of Cultural Capacities, and is further explicated in Haidle et al. (2015). The model is illustrated in Figure 1.2. Eight grades of cultural evolution are spread across two dimensions—a dimension of evolutionary biology and a dimension of history and sociality. The four lower grades (social information, social learning, traditions, and basic cultural) exist in some animal species, and are documented by ethological data. The four higher grades (modular, composite, complementary [solving a problem with a new concept], and notional [dealing with abstract concepts]) exist in hominins, and are documented by archaeological data. The scheme is not hierarchical, because the grades can exist simultaneously, and do not inevitably replace each other, as they did in nineteenth century schemes of human cultural evolution, such as that of Lewis Henry Morgan, for example (Morgan 1877). In addition, the model is meant to account for disjunction between actual behavior displayed (performance) and potential capacity for that behavior. Haidle’s chapter discusses Tasmanian culture in the late eighteenth century, which, in the early twentieth century, was compared to that of Mousterian people, and, in the late twentieth century, was compared to that of common chimpanzees. It is estimated that less than 10,000 Tasmanians existed at the time of European contact. These people were organized into 9 endogamous tribes, separated into 48–80 local bands of about 30–50 people each. There were 12 languages, divided into 5 distinct clusters. Material culture was the most primitive recorded by ethnographic evidence. Archaeology apparently documents that major cultural elements (the eating of marine fish, bone points, and the ability to make fire) had been lost, although Haidle observes that the loss of fire-making is based on sparse evidence, and that the ability to transport fire would have been very practical in the rainy Tasmanian climate, which would make starting fire very difficult. Haidle uses the distance between identification of a problem and its solution (the “problem-solution distance”) of Wolfgang Köhler that was developed in the early twentieth century as the protocol for examining cultural complexity. Köhler used this protocol to study the mentality of apes. Haidle offers no practical scheme for translating archaeological data into different stages of the problem-solution distance. Köhler’s chimpanzee investigations unfortunately taint Haidle’s later critique of the use of wild common chimpanzees to examine Tasmanian culture. Haidle extensively analyzes William McGrew’s comparison of Tasmanian behavior to that of wild common chimpanzees. She comments that McGrew deals only with food procurement behavior. Even so, she notes that McGrew left out Tasmanian stone knives and eight additional items. She further describes how stone tool assemblages increased in complexity and incorporated exotic lithic raw materials, even though fish-eating and firemaking were lost. Haidle concludes that the Tasmanians did not suffer from deteriorating mental abilities, even if their material culture became less complex. Gerhardt’s chapter is a philosophical discussion of why culture is not distinct from nature. He considers technology to be the vital element that organizes nature into culture. Whiten discusses the pre-hominin foundation of human culture by focusing on the great apes, particularly common chimpanzees. Whiten wrongly claims (p. 33) that common chimpanzees make and use a greater variety of tools than any other non-human animal. Capuchin monkeys and corvid birds rival, if not trump, chimpanzees. Although Whiten recognizes that social learning and traditions are widely distributed in the animal world, he argues that a basal great ape capacity for culture existed at 16–14 mya. The relative paucity of traditions in gorillas and bonobos must then be explained. The emphasis on common chimpanzees ignores the fact that Japanese primatologists have accumulated over sixty years of evidence for multiple innovations and traditions among Japanese macaques. And New World tufted capuchins naturally exhibit the greatest evidence of tool use among living non-human primates. Because com-