Do we confidently know that a squirrel isn't an actor of grandiose squirrel shenanigans but is actually just scraping around for food? Can we really quantify the number of our own cultural traits in an unbiased way? Would an alien observatory see us all just staring at blinking light screens, or would it know some people are playing Wii tennis while others are committing crimes?
This sentence is probably a good summary:
"Detecting animal culture irrespective of geographic variation is challenging and may not always be possible. "
Maybe not "grandiose", but squirrels are known to lie. They'll often pretend to be burying nuts in order to reduce the chance of surreptitious squirrel spies stealing the nuts they actually bury.
Ah you made this click for me. I had always failed to understand why squirrels would do this. Faking hiding a nut doesn’t feel like a productive use of energy even if other squirrels are watching. But if it is mutually understood that all squirrels are going to pretend to bury nuts n% of the time, it becomes less valuable for other squirrels to spy on you to begin with!
I wonder if the squirrel burying meta changes across generations. That is, when squirrels feel confident that nobody would bother spying, they waste less time pretending to bury nuts, which over time leads to more advantage from spying again, and thus requiring more deception.
The article mentions geographic variation as one of the easiest means to analyze animal cultures. If you hang onto that, it seems quite a bit is possible.
This sentence is probably a good summary:
"Detecting animal culture irrespective of geographic variation is challenging and may not always be possible. "
Also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative