This is Scientific American 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Travel the US and you'll hear English spoken in a multitude of ways.

And it turns out the same can go for songbirds, specifically the Swamp Sparrow.

Scientists have now used those Swamp Sparrow regional dialects together with computer simulations

to extrapolate how the Sparrow's songs have changed and evolved over time and they found that

certain song motifs could date back hundreds even thousands of years.

That's where frankly it blew me away I have to say.

Steve No wiki, a biologist at Duke University.

If Leaf Ericsson had taken time once he discovered North America to get as far in as

Northwestern Pennsylvania where I was just last week.

He would have heard some, not many, but some of the same song types that I was just listening to.

The study is in the journal Nature Communications.

Passing learned information from generation to generation, that sounds a whole lot like

culture.

It is culture.

These birds are showing a persistence of cultural tradition that is heretofore unknown and

you know sort of matches that of the best cultural persistence we might see in human culture.

But Sparrows aren't as cognitively complex as humans, he says,

implying that you don't need human-type smarts to develop cultural traditions.

Thanks for listening.

For Scientific American 60 Second Science, I'm Christopher Ntardata.

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