Do Animals Have Civilizations?
· Time
In 1928, naturalist Henry Beston famously wrote that our fellow animals are “gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings,” he added. ”They are other nations.”
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Beston employed this turn of phrase to make a fundamental point: humankind is not the standard by which other species should be judged.
That worldview would have come as a surprise to the leading thinkers from the Age of Discovery. Even as Columbus was sailing the ocean blue, many of the world's top scientists and writers were still extolling the virtues of an ancient ranking system known as the Great Chain of Being. On the top rung of that hierarchy was, of course, God. Below Him were angels, followed by all of humankind, from kings and queens to commoners and thieves.
Who could possibly be lower than the lowly thieves? This, the Great Chain said, was the domain inhabited by nonhuman animals.
An evolving definition
This supremacist mindset was evident in the introduction of the term civilization, which was created to distinguish between what Europeans deemed refined and advanced societies from supposedly primitive or savage ones. Suffice it to say that the criteria used to make such an assessment was plainly self-serving and based on a narrow set of European norms.
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 like Bedouins and Kazakhs, whose traditional oral storytelling was too often mistaken for myth, were viewed as living artifacts who were inherently less civilized.
“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.
Over time, we have rightly expanded the definition of “civilizations” to include a wider variety of societies and practices, with an emphasis on complexity, resilience, and cultural richness rather than on superiority. But only recently have we started to even consider that other animals may be capable of maintaining complex and resilient societies, acquiring and exchanging knowledge, and realizing achievements that go beyond our own metrics and abilities.
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.
Culture, for instance, has now been documented throughout the animal kingdom. Sperm whales communicate using group-specific dialects orders of magnitude older than Sanskrit. Chimpanzee communities use stone tools in distinct ways based on learned skills. Bighorn sheep rely on cultural transmissions to maintain ancestral routes through the Rockies, and forest elephants forge extensive networks of semipermanent pathways through the Congo Basin, wisdom of which is passed down intergenerationally. In situations where information-sharing is disrupted, scientists say “generations of knowledge” can be expunged.
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.
Renowned bat expert Merlin Tuttle once told me about a bat community located in a protected Florida cave that he watched grow from a couple thousand residents to more than 4 million. Then, the cave was directly hit by a hundred-year hurricane, causing most of the bats to drown. Twenty years later, long after the floodwaters subsided, Tuttle says, few bats use that cave. He believes this is a result of horror stories and dire warnings being communicated by the storm’s remaining survivors.
“They don’t hand down knowledge through books,” Tuttle said. “They hand it down bat to bat.”
Humanity also holds no monopoly on large-scale collaboration. Argentine ants are renowned for using their shared chemical language to instantly identify unannounced nest visitors as either part of their colony or not by assessing the scent markers on the guest’s exoskeleton. This decisive with-us-or-against-us approach helped give rise to a transcontinental empire that now spans 3,600 miles from Portugal to Italy, populated by billions of individuals, creating what researchers have called the “largest cooperative unit ever recorded.”
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.”
And of course, our species has plenty of company in the material infrastructure department. In 2023, while exploring North America’s “beaver belt”—a stretch of northern Canada home to many of the world’s longest dams—I joined a team of Indigenous guides to trek through the hilly forests around Pakwaw Lake, Saskatchewan. Even by Canadian standards, the beaver population in this area is staggeringly large. High-resolution satellite analysis has identified more than 2,700 individual beaver dams—believed to be the densest concentration on Earth.
—Illustration by Oliver UbertiSatellite analysis shows that the area around Pakwaw Lake, Saskatchewan, is home to at least 2,700 beaver dams—the beaver capital of the world.
The thousands of beaver families in and around Pakwaw Lake each live as autonomous units, but given the close proximity of their dams and surrounding resources, shared genetics and communication techniques of the species, and occasional interactions between neighbors, that population is also composed of loosely but meaningfully connected social groups.
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.”
Beavers are far from alone. Muskrats also build lodges, but with foot-thick walls made of grasses and wetland plants instead of sticks. In Central Africa, goliath frogs—the world’s largest—have been found to push gravel and stones around to dam waterways and create peaceful ponds where their eggs and tadpoles will be safe from predators and rising water levels. Cathedral termites in Australia build mounds up to 26 feet tall, which, relative to their individual size, makes their buildings significantly larger than humanity’s tallest skyscraper is to us. And white-browed sparrow weavers build nests based on the distinctive style of their cultural group, each of which has its own unique architectural traditions.
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.
In time, trips to the wilderness felt less like leaving civilization behind than entering new ones. Where I once would have experienced the gratification of departure, I felt only the warmth of arrival.
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.