A new book argues that animals across the globe maintain complex civilisations — complete with culture, infrastructure and intergenerational knowledge — challenging humanity’s long-held belief in its own uniqueness.
For centuries, humanity placed itself at the top of nature’s hierarchy. But a growing body of scientific evidence suggests we may have been looking at the animal kingdom all wrong.
Author Ryan Huling, in his new book The Hidden Nations of Animals, argues that countless species maintain sophisticated societies rivalling our own. Sperm whales communicate in group-specific dialects older than Sanskrit. Argentine ants have built a transcontinental empire spanning 3,600 miles — described by researchers as the “largest cooperative unit ever recorded.” Beavers have maintained dam networks for hundreds of years through what one anthropologist called “a system of continuous repairs.”
Even cultural memory exists in the wild. Bat expert Merlin Tuttle observed survivors of a hurricane warning others away from a once-thriving cave decades later. “They don’t hand down knowledge through books,” Tuttle observed. “They hand it down bat to bat.”
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