Something to crow about

Among our greatest achievements as humans, some might say, is our cumulative technological culture – the tool-using acumen that is passed from one generation to the next. As the implements we use on a daily basis are modified and refined over time, they seem to evolve right along with us.

A similar observation might be made regarding the New Caledonian crow, an extremely smart corvid and the only non-human species hypothesized to possess its own cumulative technological culture. How the birds transmit knowledge to each other is the focus of a study by Corina Logan, a junior research fellow at UC Santa Barbara's Sage Center for the Study of the Mind when she conducted her research. Currently, she is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge.

"We don't know whether the crows have cumulative technological culture, and one of the reasons is that we don't know how they learn," said Logan. "There's a hypothesis that says in order for cumulative technological culture to occur you need to copy the actions of another individual. And we don't know whether the crows are paying attention to the actions of others when they learn from someone else."

Source: www.sciencedaily.com