The world is filled with different people and unique cultures, all of which contribute to the human race in some special way. According to a study published in the journal Current Biology, some cultural behaviors that were once thought to be universal are actually just passed down from generation to generation.

For example, most experts had previously thought that activities like singing to infants to comfort them, or even dancing, were something that all humans engaged in. Sure, a mother in the United States might sing a very different song than one in Japan, but everyone used some type of music to soothe their children.

The Northern Ache tribe, which is a forest-dwelling tribe in Paraguay, doesn’t sing, or even hum, to their little ones. In addition, there is no evidence that they engage in dance at all. Dr. Manvir Singh from the University of California, Davis, talked with IFLScience about the study, saying:

“This demonstrates that dance and infant-directed song – including lullabies – are not absolute universals. A cultureless human will not spontaneously engage in them; you need some sort of cultural transmission to have dance and to have infant-directed song.”

Another very unusual thing about this community is that they do not know how to make fire. This skill is something most people associate with the earliest humans, but this group doesn’t know how to do it. This skill, however, is something that they once knew and had forgotten sometime in the relatively recent past.

The co-author of the study, Professor Kim Hill, spent 122 months living in the area and interacting with the Northern Ache between 1977 and 2020. This experience is the basis of much of the study.

The Northern Ache likely lost their ability to make fire when a larger group split into two smaller groups (the Northern and the Southern Ache tribes). This may also be when they stopped dancing.

Sadly, this split did not happen naturally, but only when outsiders entered the area. Singh explained:

“by the mid-1800s, Jesuit missionaries and slave raiders from Brazil had depopulated the part of Paraguay [inhabited by the Northern Aché].” In the 1970s, “disease and forced out migration – essentially kidnapping by Paraguayans – led to further demographic collapse.”

Later, the Northern Ache were placed onto reservations where they seemed to stop engaging in practices such as polygyny and hunting magic.

Cultural evolution is a complicated subject with experts trying to parse out what types of things enter cultures universally, and which ones are passed down from generation to generation.

This new study provides a lot of new information that goes against previous understandings.

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