Disregarding certain aspects, I found the main idea of this excerpt from Patricia Crone's Pre-Industrial Societies quite useful. This is from the beginning of the chapter entitled 'Culture.'
[Animals'] genetic programme might well have been unsuited for the [hypothetical] island, in which they would have risked dying out; but the only, or almost only, way they could have adapted themselves would have been by natural selection. The human animal is of course genetically programmed too. However, its programme for social organization is deficient (and to some extent even counter-productive). The programme does little but instruct its bearer to learn, or in other words to acquire culture with which to supplement (and in some cases even to suppress) such specific instructions as it retains. Without doing so, the species simply could not survive; doing so, it can survive almost anywhere on earth and even, for limited periods, outside it. Culture is thus the species-specific environment of Homo sapiens. Living in accordance with nature is an attractive idea, but in the human case it actually looks like living with culture.
(bold mine)
