page_title: American anthropology
section_title: Biological anthropology
hierarchical_section_title: American anthropology / Biological anthropology
caption_attribution_description: English: Children in Jerusalem.
context_page_description: American anthropology has culture as its central and unifying concept. This most commonly refers to the universal human capacity to classify and encode human experiences symbolically, and to communicate symbolically encoded experiences socially. American anthropology is organized into four fields, each of which plays an important role in research on culture:
  biological anthropology
  linguistic anthropology
  cultural anthropology
  archaeology
  Research in these fields has influenced anthropologists working in other countries to different degrees.
context_section_description: Discussion concerning culture among biological anthropologists centers around two debates. First, is culture uniquely human or shared by other species (most notably, other primates)? This is an important question, as the theory of evolution holds that humans are descended from (now extinct) non-human primates. Second, how did culture evolve among human beings?
  Gerald Weiss noted that although Tylor's classic definition of culture was restricted to humans, many anthropologists take this for granted and thus elide that important qualification from later definitions, merely equating culture with any learned behavior. This slippage is a problem because during the formative years of modern primatology, some primatologists were trained in anthropology (and understood that culture refers to learned behavior among humans), and others were not. Notable non-anthropologists, like Robert Yerkes and Jane Goodall thus argued that since chimpanzees have learned behaviors, they have culture. Today, anthropological primatologists are divided, several arguing that non-human primates have culture, others arguing that they do not.
  This scientific debate is complicated by ethical concerns. The subjects of primatology are non-human primates, and whatever culture these primates have is threatened by human activity. After reviewing the research on primate culture, W. C. McGrew concluded, "[a] discipline requires subjects, and most species of nonhuman primates are endangered by their human cousins.  Ultimately, whatever its merit, cultural primatology must be committed to cultural survival [i.e. to the survival of primate cultures]."
  McGrew suggests a definition of culture that he finds scientifically useful for studying primate culture. He points out that scientists do not have access to the subjective thoughts or knowledge of non-human primates. Thus, if culture is defined in terms of knowledge, then scientists are severely limited in their attempts to study primate culture. Instead of defining culture as a kind of knowledge, McGrew suggests that we view culture as a process. He lists six steps in the process:
  A new pattern of behavior is invented, or an existing one is modified.
  The innovator transmits this pattern to another.
  The form of the pattern is consistent within and across performers, perhaps even in terms of recognizable stylistic features.
  The one who acquires the pattern retains the ability to perform it long after having acquired it.
  The pattern spreads across social units in a population. These social units may be families, clans, troops, or bands.
  The pattern endures across generations.
  McGrew admits that all six criteria may be strict, given the difficulties in observing primate behavior in the wild. But he also insists on the need to be as inclusive as possible, on the need for a definition of culture that "casts the net widely":
  Culture is considered to be group-specific behavior that is acquired, at least in part, from social influences.  Here, group is considered to be the species-typical unit, whether it be a troop, lineage, subgroup, or so on.  Prima facie evidence of culture comes from within-species but across-group variation in behavior, as when a pattern is persistent in one community of chimpanzees but is absent from another, or when different communities perform different versions of the same pattern.  The suggestion of culture in action is stronger when the difference across the groups cannot be explained solely by ecological factors ....
  — 
  As Charles Frederick Voegelin pointed out, if "culture" is reduced to "learned behavior," then all animals have culture. Certainly all specialists agree that all primate species evidence common cognitive skills: knowledge of object-permanence, cognitive mapping, the ability to categorize objects, and creative problem solving. Moreover, all primate species show evidence of shared social skills: they recognize members of their social group; they form direct relationships based on degrees of kinship and rank; they recognize third-party social relationships; they predict future be
caption: Children in Jerusalem
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