Beston employed this turn of phrase to make a fundamental point: humankind is not the standard by which other species should be judged.
Who could possibly be lower than the lowly thieves? This, the Great Chain said, was the domain inhabited by nonhuman animals.
The Inca, for instance, earned enormous respect from the Spaniards for their great works of architecture, but were nonetheless deemed a “backward” society due to their lack of a written alphabet and non-Christian belief system.
“Nomads have no history,” the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze later wrote. “They only have geography.” Prejudices also prevented European colonists from acknowledging the impressive stone wall and tower constructions built in the southern African city of Great Zimbabwe, which they incorrectly assumed must have been the work of a long-lost white civilization. Other criteria, like equity and sustainability, were scarcely considered at all.
Sophisticated societies of all shapes and sizes
Many of the tenets of modern-day civilizations are rooted in practices we falsely assumed to be exclusive to humankind.
Animal cultures are now so broadly accepted within scientific circles that a growing cohort of researchers have called for UNESCO to protect them alongside humanity’s “intangible” traditions like ancient navigational techniques, ritual dances, and seasonal festivals.
“They don’t hand down knowledge through books,” Tuttle said. “They hand it down bat to bat.”
Remarkably, the ants even retain their supercolony recognition across an ever-growing global diaspora. When individuals from Europe’s main supercolony have been introduced to their peers from Japan, they still greet each other like old friends—members of what entomologists have dubbed the “Intercontinental Union of Argentine Ants.”
—Illustration by Oliver Uberti
Satellite analysis shows that the area around Pakwaw Lake, Saskatchewan, is home to at least 2,700 beaver dams—the beaver capital of the world.
When researchers took a fresh look at an 1868 map drawn by anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan of what he described as “a beaver district” in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula composed of 64 dams and ponds, surveyors found that 75% of the dams were still standing—or perhaps had been blown out and rebuilt in the same spot—150 years later. The dams, Morgan wrote, “have existed in the same places for hundreds and thousands of years,” and “have been maintained by a system of continuous repairs.”
We are surrounded by wild civilizations
After wending my way through culture-rich nonhuman societies around the globe, tracing the network connections and shared histories within populations—or sometimes a network of populations—Beston’s century-old idea of animal “nations” started to take on new resonance for me.
This essay was adapted from Ryan Huling’s new book The Hidden Nations of Animals, with permission from Penguin Random House. Illustrations by Oliver Uberti.
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