Elephant Moms Carry the Wisdom of Generations | IN OUR NATURE (1)
Look at that baby.
That is a tiny baby.
Yeah, that is a young baby.
It's such a good thing to see.
With all of the challenges elephants face that there are so many healthy, young elephants
in this group.
Some of these old matriarchs in here, you can just tell they carry such history.
I think they know where to find food year after year.
Exactly.
It's culture.
For a long time, people assumed culture was limited to our own species.
But the more that we observe other intelligent animals, big and small, culture, maybe far
more widespread than we first thought.
Hey, what's up guys?
Hey hey Hey.
We can all agree that humans have culture, right?
Yeah.
Some of us are more cultured than others.
You know.
I don't have a mustache, that's ridiculous.
I mean is culture, something we're born with is culture in our genes?
I mean, we all have genes that tell our bodies to build a mouth and a stomach, right?
And we have these instincts that tell us what's probably food and what's probably not food,
but it's culture that tells you whether you eat pita or pizza in any given meal.
This is like the difference of eating hot dish versus casserole.
And for the record, it's hot dish.
It's casserole.
I think it's casserole.
Talking about a dish to pass?
It's a hot dish to pass.
We'll debate this later guys.
Anyway, what I want to talk about today is that we're beginning to appreciate that culture
is far more widespread among animals than we used to realize.
And it's often in ways that are really surprising and unexpected.
It's a story that's going to take us from an elephant family reunion in Tanzania, to
some acoustic detectives under the Golden Gate Bridge.
We're going to talk about whether other animals have a culture too.
And whether it's like ours, or not.
And if other animals do have a culture, what can that teach us about ourselves?
Can you just define what culture is for a second?
Okay.
I mean, culture is one of those things you know it when you see it, right?
It's a little bit hard to define, but let's give it a shot.
Culture is information and habits and behavior that can be passed around socially.
They can be learned, remembered and shared.
That totally makes sense, Joe.
I feel like you shared that with me and I will socially remember it and learn it.
I'm very cultured.
That's why I was able to define that.
Let's go back for a minute.
The earliest awareness of non-human animal culture is probably a study going back to
the 1950s on Japanese macaque monkeys.
One day one grabs a sweet potato and washes it in the water before eating it.
Then the monkeys and the first monkey's social network started washing their sweet potatoes.
Soon, all of the monkeys on this island are washing their potatoes.
Something only the macaques on this island started doing.
They learned from others and shared with others.
And later, Jane Goodall and other researchers made animal culture famous by their studies
on chimpanzees.
But I think that maybe these aren't that surprising because you know, monkeys, chimpanzees, they're
like our cousins.
We have culture, so it's maybe not so surprising that they do too.
Since those early studies, scientists have added more animals to the culture list.
Get in jokers, we're going to Africa.
This is amazing.
We just rolled up on an elephant.
My first elephant.
Your first elephant?
You guys remember Jahawi, right?
He's a filmmaker and photographer from Kenya that joined me on this trip.
My first elephant.
Amazing.
Well it's not my elephant.
It's the first one I've seen.
Elephants belong to no one.
He's his own elephant.
He is his own elephant.
Why is this elephant all by itself?
So this is a young male.
And like you saw when we first saw him, he was all feisty.
It's kind of that teenage energy of, take me seriously.
Yeah, I'm tough.
I'm a tough elephant.
But you know, he's probably recently been pushed out of the family group.
You know, after young males get to a certain age, they tend to slowly get pushed a way.
Pause for a second, and just talk about the elephant family dynamic.
They live in these groups of a few, to, maybe a few dozen individuals.
Now when male elephants in these groups hit 12 to 15 years old, they get pushed out of
the group to live on their own.
These are matriarchal societies and they're led by an older female.
And within that group you'll have that female and her sisters, their kids, even their grandkids.
It's a multi-generational society, and they do basically everything together.
From feeding to, I don't know, pouring mud on themselves, whatever elephants do all day.
Even helping raise each other's kids.
So there's our first ingredient.
That extended time of care and learning, that's important.
Okay.
So after I saw my first elephant, I got pretty good at finding elephants, if I do say so
myself.
How could you miss it?
They're big.
They are very big.
They're very well camouflaged.
It's hard.
Trust me.
We were just looking at a giraffe skeleton and I turned around and looked through my
binoculars and there's more elephants on the horizon.
We're going to see more.
We're going to go see more elephants.
Good spotting.
Thanks.
You're actually useful.
I've earned my place on the trip.
And then Jahawi learned a very important lesson.
A good lesson learned is always put fresh batteries in your camera in the morning.
That's one way that we learn, right?
By trial and error.
And sure enough, the next day, Jahawi had full batteries in his camera and he got that
picture that he wanted.
Aw, that's so nice!
But individual learning, by trial and error, it does have its limitations.
I mean, for one it's kind of risky, right?
If every elephant had to learn what foods were toxic and what weren't, then, well, there'd
be a lot fewer elephants out there.
The individual learning is limited to your own experiences, but social learning, that
lets you learn from the experiences of everyone.
I mean, you can learn what generations worth of individuals have figured out.
It's like getting a hot dish recipe from your grandma and posting it to social media.
Casserole.
We'll talk.
I still have no idea what you guys are talking about, but it's cute.
Okay.
Anyway.
This opens up so many possibilities for elephants.
They have these huge brains.
They are super intelligent, and those brains make them really good at learning from one
another.
You know, stuff like how to give yourself the perfect mud bath or which flowers taste
the tastiest.
I think it's the yellow ones.
That's what they all seem to be eating.
Elephants, even learn what we would call rituals, I guess, like mourning, dead elephants.
Oh man.
That's so sad though.
So do all elephant families do this?
Yeah, most do.
But they do it in their own way.
And that's, what's important.
Imagine many generations of elephants witnessing and sharing this special behavior.
I mean, where do we get our culture from?
We learned it from our elders, from our families, from our social circles.
Have you guys ever heard the saying, "an elephant never forgets."
Yeah, of course.
Definitely.
Can't remember.
I mean elephants, they forget tons of stuff.
But remembering, plays a critical part in their cultural lives.
So you just heard in the other car that there's a big group of ellie's.
That's a big, big group of ellie's.
So in front of us, I mean more than a dozen, maybe 20?
30?
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
It could be over 30.
There's more over there.
Wow.
That's a lot of ellie's.
Keep our distance for now.
I mean eventually they will surround us.
We've been trying to get close to this beautiful
family group.
They're worked up.
A lot of defensive displays, trumpeting at us and they very clearly don't want us around.
Yeah, it was strange.
I mean, we came up to this massive herd and obviously a few family groups, but they were
agitated.
And like, that one is not a happy elephant.
Now, potentially what that could be is, is negative association.
And we were trying to figure out if there are any hunting near
here, because sometimes that causes ellie's to be quite shy of vehicles and react that
way.
But they've had some bad experiences with humans.
Humans before that could be a memory that was passed down to this elephant from its
mother.
Think about that.
Somewhere in these elephants' social memory is this association that vehicles with these
weird little primates inside, well that's bad.
And so they stay away from us.
And what's super interesting is that the elephants that are behaving this way, they might've
never actually had that experience themselves.
And later we observed this totally different family group and the matriarch was wearing
this GPS collar.
You can imagine one day these scientists drove up in a vehicle a lot like ours, they drugged
her, they put that thing on and it probably wasn't a very fun day for her.
And she made sure that her family stayed at far away from us.
I can totally imagine this elephant modeling a behavior to her kids.
You know, "yo stay away from those loud things."
She might've even passed this experience to other elephants like in a social or cultural
memory.
She gets an elephant book and she's like, "watch out for the car"
Trunk book.
Well their memory is clearly working.
So they're worked up.
We're going to let them be.
Yeah.
It's not the only elephants out here.
And I think we can find some more.
We can find some more.
Now, all of this chasing elephants, it was leading us to something that I don't think
any of us were expecting.
As we drove up onto this big open plain.
There were just elephants everywhere.
Isn't this just incredible?
So, I mean, it's the Serengeti.
The sun was starting to get pretty intense and these elephants had all spread themselves
out to where there's one little family group under each tree, kind of getting a little
bit of shade, taking a break.
You know, when you're looking from a distance, they look like they're all together.
If you see her now they're very much still in the family group and they get to a certain
size too, they can split.
So you can imagine that family group probably has relatives in that group.
It probably has relatives.
You know?
So these kinds of times of plenty, you get these herds that come together and you do
have social interaction because they're incredibly social animals.
They know each other.
This is like an elephant reunion.
Who brought the hot dish?
It's casserole.
I guess grasserole is more appropriate in this case.
But, so proud of for that.
Okay.
You shouldn't be.
This is one of the most incredible things I have ever seen in my life, guys.
I mean, they were out there just checking each other out, socializing, seeing who's
who, making all kinds of noises.
You could just tell that there was a huge amount of information being exchanged out
there.
Information about what?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't speak elephants.
But inside all of these social groups, kind of tucked in by the tree, underneath mom's
legs were the most important guests at this elephant reunion.
Yeah.
Young baby.
That's under a year old for sure.
It's kind of an easy way to try and figure out the age of a young one.
If it kind of fits underneath mum, it's like a year old.