The DOI matches its Crossref record.
The Evolution of Culture in Animals
Abstract
Animals do have culture, maintains this delightfully illustrated and provocative book, which cites a number of fascinating instances of animal communication and learning. John Bonner traces the origins of culture back to the early biological evolution of animals and provides examples of five categories of behavior leading to nonhuman culture: physical dexterity, relations with other species, auditory communication within a species, geographic locations, and inventions or innovations. Defining culture as the transmission of information by behavioral rather than genetical means, he demonstrates the continuum between the traits we find in animals and those we often consider uniquely human.
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Citations
Cited by
(1976) · Cited by 10,423
Whiten, A., Goodall, J., McGrew, W. C., Nishida, T., Reynolds, V., Sugiyama, Y., Tutin, C. E. G., Wrangham, R. W., & Boesch, C. (1999) · Nature · doi:10.1038/21415 · Cited by 2,341
Culture in whales and dolphins
Rendell, L., & Whitehead, H. (2001) · Behavioral and Brain Sciences · doi:10.1017/s0140525x0100396x · Cited by 990
The question of animal culture
Galef, B. G. (1992) · Human Nature · doi:10.1007/bf02692251 · Cited by 718
Fitch, W. T. (2010) · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511817779 · Cited by 594
Metadata
- Authors
- Dissanayake, E., & Bonner, J. T.
- Venue
- Leonardo
- Publisher
- JSTOR
- Published
- 1984
- Volume
- 17
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 62
- ISSN
- 0024-094X (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1590684677
- Cited by
- 444
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 602.97
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Evolution of Culture in Animals. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/1574888
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- Dissanayake, E., & Bonner, J. T. (1984). The Evolution of Culture in Animals. Leonardo. https://doi.org/10.2307/1574888
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
