The Vocabulary of Sperm Whales

It's well known that whales and dolphins can communicate using sound, sometimes over long distances. In some cases, this can involve sophisticated "whalesong" that animals can use, for example, to identify each other, and that may impart other information, too. But there are a great many species of cetacean, and what is true for one won't necessarily be true for all of the others, just as what's true of chimps won't always be true for baboons or marmosets.

We'd expect the most complex messages to come from those species with the most complex social lives. In these cases, it would be useful for the animal to identify not only its gender, fitness, sexual status, and so on, but also which other whales it might associate with, and where it stands in the local hierarchy. Most (but not all) cetaceans live in pods although, for many, we haven't gotten very far in identifying how those are structured. They all, however, have relatively large brains and it can be worth asking, for any given species, just how complex their communication really is.

Call of the Elephants

Arguably the single most significant feature that has enabled our own species to dominate the Earth is our possession of language. This enables us to communicate and cooperate to achieve things we could not do individually, to an extent unparalleled outside of social insects, which lack our ability for complex thought in other ways. Without language, it's hard to see how we would have built cities, or maintained the incremental advance in knowledge that has marked many thousands of years of our history.

Yet language, of course, did not arise from nowhere. There is an understandable interest among scientists in determining how it might have evolved, and what from. Since we can't go back in time to perform linguistic analysis on the likes of Homo erectus, one of our major sources of information is determining how other species of mammals communicate using sound, rather than the scent marks that are so important to many of them. Much of the focus here is on primates, since these are the most likely to hold clues to our own origins, but this can be extended to other species, too. To what extent do other animals have something that could be considered ancestral to language?

Do Gorillas Have Culture?

Animal behaviour is generally instinctual. Their behaviour is, in some way, wired into their genetics, and doesn't vary from one animal to another. Particularly in mammals and birds, individual animals may be shaped by their life experiences, learning new things as they go. But what they can't do, as a rule, is pass that information on to others. Mothers may teach their young how to do certain things, but that teaching process is itself instinctual, so that all animals of a given species learn more or less the same thing as infants.

A large part of the success of our own species is down to our ability to circumvent this, to build on the knowledge of previous generations. This results, among other things, in the development of culture, differences in behaviour based not on the experiences of only one individual, but of their ancestors, in a way that isn't genetic. Britain and Japan are different culturally, not just because of environmental variation (Japan has earthquakes, for example, and has different mineral resources than Britain) but simply because of the vicissitudes of history, the separate evolution of their languages, and so on.