Culture and cultural identities
The difference between the life of a skin-clad hunter leaving a cave with a spear over his shoulder to hunt mammoth, and a smartly dressed executive driving along a motorway in New York, London or Tokyo, to consult their computer print-out, is not due to any further physical development of the body or brain during the long period that separates them, but to a completely new evolutionary factor; culture.
People have credited themselves with several talents to distinguish themselves from all other animals. Once we thought that we were the only creatures to make and use tools. We now know that this is not so. Chimpanzees do so and so do finches in the Galapagos that cut and trim long thorns to use as pins extracting grubs from holes in wood. Even our complex spoken language seems less special the more we learn about the communications used by chimpanzees and dolphins. But we are the only creatures to have painted representational pictures and it is this talent which led to developments which ultimately transformed the life of mankind. That skill is the use a written information in order to communicate between ourselves and to create our own cultural identities.
