If by culture one means learned or invented behaviors that are passed down through generations, I don't think it's limited to apes or even primates. It's not like those birds in Japan who drop nuts onto busy streets in front of nut-cracking traffic evolved the behavior via natural selection, and I don't think Moscow's metro-taking canines all figured out how to take public transportation independently.
You don't need language or symboling or abstract thought (I'm not sure what the latter means anway -- isn't all thought abstract?) to pass on such behaviors. You just need imitation. Animal X figures out a good way to do something. Animals Y and Z observe this and think (nonsymbolically) "damn, that's a good idea" and copy it. Their offspring A, B, and C copy it, as do their offspring, etc. When X Y and Z die, nobody will remember where the behavior came from, but that doesn't really matter.
--- On Mon, 8/10/09, Alan Rudy <alan.rudy at gmail.com> wrote:
The point about tool-using apes
> wasn't to argue that they have "culture", it was to show
> the ways their tool
> use fits, quite nicely, the quote from Marx you provided as
> a means of
> showing the difference between human beings and animals -
> entities that Marx
> calls "mere animals" because of their lack of what you call
> culture.
>