Interspecific Cultural Convergences (ICC) and Interspecific Cultural Studies (ICS) From the Only Human Towards a Comparative History of Animal Uses and Traditions

Predictability is a relational, historically and culturally shaped concept. A phenomenon can be defined as predictable in relation to the available knowl- edge, instruments and methods, as well as the epistemic horizons in which its explanation is located (E. Fox Keller 2002). From this point of view, the last hundred years in the field of comparative study of animal behaviours and minds have led to radical changes in our epistemic horizon by extending our understanding of what we have to consider predictable or unpredictable in animal behaviours. Indeed, this historical phase has seen the discovery of entire classes of phenomena related to the expression of animal thought, languages, societies and cultures, which in the preceding decades would have been considered impossible within relevant scientific areas as anthropology, comparative psychology, theoretical and moral philosophy, linguistic and cul- tural studies. For instance, new sound analysis technologies developed over the last decades have allowed a decoding of bird songs that, pushing the limits of our sensory and cognitive channels, allowed us to appreciate its syntactic complexity and the richness of its intraspecific differentiations (cultural tra- ditions), radically modifying our views. In the last ten years, the analysis of the cerebral structures of birds has also demonstrated the presence of areas for processing and decoding acoustic communication similar to those found in our central nervous system. The brain of parrots, corvides and sparrows has been shown to have a higher neuronal density than that of mammals, including primates. Higher is also the percentage of neurons that are part of the brain areas destined to the so-called “superior functions” as the bark in mammals and the Pallium in birds. A research directed by Clifton W. Rags- dale, of the University of Chicago, has recently confirmed a close affinity between the mammal neocortex and the birds’ DVR, or ventricular backbone (J. Dugas-Ford, J.J. Rowell, C.W. Ragsdale 2012). In the last fifty years, 222 Marco Celentano the use of microphones suitable for recording in the deep sea, and the com- puterized analysis of sounds, made us begin to understand the complexity of whale songs, or the amazing analogies of the dolphins’ whistling with human names. In the same span of time, progress in the techniques of brain analysis has shown that the cetacean’s paralimbic system makes possible a very rapid integration of perceptions and a richness of information which is considered superior to the human one, and that cetacean such as humpback whales and dolphins have brains with even more cortical convolutions than humans (R. D. Fields 2008). These developments open up new perspectives, making it necessary to overcome, both in scientific training and in research, classical dichotomies such as nature/culture, Natural Sciences/Humanities. They integrate the horizon of the foreseeable, including the expectation of a gradual extension of the class of organisms that we should recognize as “cultural animals”, as well as of the phenomena to which this chapter is devoted: the cases of Cul- tural Convergent Evolution between different species.