The attribution of culture to non-human animals has been controversial and continues to fuel much heated debate. Much of this debate hinges on how culture is defined. In 1952, Kroeber and Kluckhohn compiled a comprehensive review of how the term culture had been used in modern times up until the early 1950s. They collated 168 definitions, all implying a human prerogative, and exemplified by Tyler’s classic definition of culture as ‘that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society’. Kant (1786) was highly influential in originally formulating this human-centric concept of culture as that ‘artifice unique to man which has permitted human beings to escape their natural animality and express their rational [and moral] humanity [… and] their freedom from the laws of nature’ . The anthropological concept of culture centres on the idea that culture is learned, rather than biologically inherited, cross-generational, adaptive, and based on systems of arbitrarily assigned meanings that are shared by a society. Anthropological definitions therefore typically refer specifically to the human nature of culture centred on language, symbols, teaching and imitation . Human-centric definitions of culture therefore leave little or no room for understanding the evolutionary origins of human culture. In their strictest sense they also reject the possibility for culture among early hominins: the australopithicines and Homo habilis ....