Great apes

A while back I read lots of stuff on animal intelligence, and the idea of animal culture, including an interesting book called The Ape and the Sushi Master. The reference in the title is to the way that a trainee sushi chef spends years watching the master at work before even trying to make sushi, and is apparently then pretty good at it from the off.

The thing that surprised me in the book was the author's definition of culture as something which was of material benefit to the animals involved. He was looking at different groups of apes with different ways of obtaining the same foods with basic tools like a stripped twig. But I think that culture among humans could almost be defined as not having a material benefit. What have I gained from reading War and Peace? I've gained a lot in some indefinable way, but it hasn't increased the protein in my diet. Examinations of grooming habits seemed much more like culture to me -- there was some fascinating stuff about a group of zoo apes who held hands while grooming each other and then developed a very distinctive habit of clasping their hands together above their heads while grooming, and the way that this habit was taken up by new apes joining the group, and sometimes spread by apes who went to other zoos.

Anyhoo, the point is that the idea of learning by looking was making me happy this morning, as I was checking out a manuscript for damage. Usually I'm such a responsible manuscript reader that I wouldn't order one up without a sound reason for needing to see it, and I would have digested the basic bibliography on the stuff and know all about it, etc. Checking things out for damage means I have only a very basic sense of what they are beforehand. Today I had something which I think is Luxeuil minuscule, definitely Merovingian. It's distressing how challenging it is just to read that sort of stuff, let alone decide anything else about it. I think it's from the eighth century, and it might be from Corbie. The g is definitely where Caroline got its g from. I wonder whether the initials, with their cheerful large-eyed birds, had any influence on Type-II initials from England? It's quite Insular, this stuff, that is it has the sorts of features which might more popularly be called 'Celtic', with interlace, strange animals, and red dotting around initials. It's quite Insular in its extravagance, too, a sort of sense of letters doing more than just conveying words.