This article is the second part of a two-part series on animal culture. The first part discusses some new findings of adopting local food preferences in vervet monkeys. In a double-whammy of animal culture in the most recent issue of Science, Jenny Allen, Mason Weinrich, Will Hoppitt & Luke Rendell report a study based on [...]

Something I get asked occasionally as someone who works on animal cognition is ‘what makes humans different from other animals?’ This is a tough one, because, as humans are of course animals, it is much easier to list the similarities between us and other animals in our behaviour and how our brains process things than [...]

A captive parrot in an Austrian research lab near Vienna has started using tools, adding to a complex story that began more than fifty years ago in the forests of Tanzania. “During three years in the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in Tanganyika, East Africa, I saw chimpanzees use natural objects as tools on many occasions,” [...]

Moreton Bay is a small patch of ocean bounded by Queensland, Australia, on the west and on the east by Moreton Island and North Stradbroke Island. The bay is home, by various estimates, to between six hundred and eight hundred Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops aduncus). A study conducted in the late 1990s found that the [...]

A trip to an unfamiliar part of the world is all you need in order to realize that humans have vastly different ways of eating, playing, talking, problem-solving, and so much more. Some of us use forks, while others prefer chopsticks, and still others simply eat with their hands. All three of these solutions emerged [...]