Here is a lecture where this post likely picked from. Sapolsky gets into this topic at around 35 minute marker. It has nothing to do with methodological debate. This is entire lecture is premised around the similarities (and differences) humans have to other primates.
In the example given here in this post, and which is given in the lecture, it was meant to draw a similarity between humans and baboons, in that cultural transmission is not a uniquely human characteristic. In particular, once the alphas had died, the younger members from other groups which joined the more social and less aggressive group took about 6 months to acclimate to the different culture in that group, as it was enforced by the older members of that group. This has nothing to do with methodology whatsoever. And as I stated in our previous thread, and which Sapolsky has written about and lectured about for 30 years, the behavior of other primates is of great interest and relevance to the understanding of our own behavior and social structures.
Also, your smugness at the notion that ideological bias is somehow reserved to political or religious discourse is offensive. Some of the most ideological people I've ever met worship ration, and their God is Mars.
You use words that obfuscate your own meaning, in your attempt to appear educated and knowledgeable. And in the case where the words are actually tenable and not fused together in ambiguous ways, like sociocultural, or variability--what do they even mean?--you could have avoided appearing pretentious or pedantic by simply expressing yourself in layperson language.
Upon closer inspection, of course, I recognize intelligence and some sort of academic scientific background. And you can't seriously expect the general public, or even educated people, to readily identify terms such as "ethnographic method" or to make sense out of some lofty rhetoric like "You get a very interesting, nonlinear interaction between the environment, human biology, and cultural history." Which means you are deliberately limiting your scope of audience, or, to borrow from my own field jargon, you are a low self-monitor with a habit of defining yourself in terms of the reflection of your own projection in others.
I have a background in psychology, with graduate level coursework in evolutionary, developmental, and biological psychology. I've also read a few things, to put it lightly. There is a book written by a Zooligist named Matt Ridly called The Origins of Virtue, published in 1996, which deals specifically with the topic of human social behavior and the role of cooperation in our evolution and present state. He discusses and cites a lot of primate based research, as well as Game Theory and related topics, which Sapolsky not surprisingly discussed in his lecture.
It can be a source of information or a heuristic but it is not going to tell us what humans can or cannot do. It will simply tell us what humans have done at historical periods and, with scientific insight, why.
As to this comment, I take it that you tend toward the environmental predictor for human behavior and potential. As Sapolsky himself noted, behavior is understood not simply in terms of the environment, but also in terms of the genetic predisposition of the individual, and even more specifically, as a synthesis or interaction between these two forces. Dismissing past "ethnographic" groups and human history is essentially tossing out the validity of genetic contribution to present social structure and individual behavior. It's ridiculous. The Tabula Rasa myth is only half complete. Genetics have a co-determinitive role in behavior, and they are what is left to us by generations past. Observing a past behavior, event, or phenomena by some human or group of humans exactly demonstrates human potentiality. How absurd to dismiss this!
Thankfully the monks in the Middle Ages didn't dismiss the idea that human potentiality can be just as valid in the study of historical ideas, documents, and people, or else we might still be sitting around a fire. After Rome fell, the world went to sleep, and human potentiality stagnated for 1000 years. It wasn't simply the vigor of some drunk Catholic monk, or the Renaissance Scholar, which awoke us from our slumber. The documents translated from the Ancient Greeks humbled the learned men of the day with geometry and astronomy.
No, only a fool would seek to constrain the field of view to a handful of idiots in a club with a special vocabulary. But alas, in studying history, it is no surprise that this is one facet of human potential. Even Hegel himself would shudder, and, after a long tirade of dialectical profanity, he would thank me for recognizing that the whole contains the positive along with some negation.