Animal cultures have been of interest for decades. However, they are also controversial because many feel that the observed behavioural variation between communities of the same species should not be granted the label ‘culture’. This is because this word, in its human sense, includes more than ‘simple’ behavioural variation. In recent years, the debate on animal culture has mainly been concerned with the social learning mechanisms, often claimed to be human-specific, which led to the uniqueness of human culture. In this article, I will first give a state of the art of the main theories that have been proposed to explain differences between human and animal cultures. I will show that these theories have missed to address the fundamental question of what is truly transmitted in animal culture, and show that the focus should be put on mental representation transmission rather than behavioural variation if one wants to compare the two phenomena. To do so, I will review some recent data obtained with wild apes and analyze them through a cognitive perspective. I will analyze whether apes’ failure to adopt novel tool-use techniques can be explained with relatively low-demanding explanations in terms of cognitive load such as behavioural conservatism (sticking to a strategy) or functional fixedness; two mechanisms where mental representations may prevent an individual to explore and analyze its environment in a more cognitively active way. By active thinking, I imply the ability of humans to handle fairly easily their mental representations, notably thanks to extended natural metarepresentational abilities. I will show that including the analyse of animal cultural behaviour under the scope of representation and metarepresentation in the debate may be necessary to understand the extent of animal cultures and, crucially, may allow us to specify where and at which point in our evolution human cultures came to differ from their biological roots.