Highlights•Birds can show cultural behaviour across multiple behavioural
contexts.•Evolutionary theory is a useful tool to examine cultural change over time.•I review …

Acoustic signals mediate mate choice, resource defense, and species recognition in a broad
range of taxa. It has been proposed, therefore, that divergence in acoustic signals plays a …

This review reports on the effects of human activities on animal acoustic signals published in
the literature from 1970 to 2009. Almost 5% of the studies on variation in animal …

Cultural traditions have been observed in a wide variety of animal species. It remains
unclear, however, what is required for social learning to give rise to stable traditions: what …

Multilevel societies, containing hierarchically nested social levels, are remarkable social
structures whose origins are unclear. The social relationships of sperm whales are …

In urban environments, anthropogenic noise can interfere with animal communication. Here
we study the influence of urban noise on the cultural evolution of bird songs. We studied …

Culturally transmitted communication signals–such as human language or bird song–can
change over time through cultural drift, and the resulting dialects may consequently enhance …

Hypotheses on regional song variation (" dialects") assume that dialects remain stable within
regions, are distinct between regions, and persist within populations over extensive periods …

Highlights•Comparative evidence supports two explanations for the origin of vocal
learning.•In one, vocal learning is favored by sexual selection for complex vocalizations.•In …

Acoustical geographic variation is common in widely distributed species and it is already
described for several taxa, at various scales. In cetaceans, intraspecific variation in acoustic …