Monkeys making stone chips raise questions about early humans: shots

Macaques use stones as hammers to smash open food items such as shellfish and nuts.

Lydia in Longs


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Lydia in Longs


Macaques use stones as hammers to smash open food items such as shellfish and nuts.

Lydia in Longs

When monkeys in Thailand use stones as hammers and anvils to help them crack open nuts, they often accidentally create sharp flakes of rock that resemble stone-cutting tools made by early humans.

this sudden discovery, described in the journal Science advancesarchaeologists are wondering if they need to rethink their assumptions about some stone artifacts produced by early human ancestors more than a million years ago.

“You have a group of non-human primates who make things very much like the kinds of things that we wanted to assign exclusively to the behavior of humans and their ancestors,” he says. Jessica Thompsona paleontologist and anthropologist at Yale University, was not part of the team that conducted this new research.

She notes that the manufacture of sharp cutting tools made of stone, which can be dated as far back as 3.3 million years ago, was long seen as a major technological innovation in human history, an innovation that concludes with a set of assumptions about evolution. A unique human trait.

But now, says Thompson, archaeologists will have to grapple with the problem of trying to figure out whether the sharp stone flakes were made on purpose or by mistake.

“It has implications that range from, like, when did the first humans ever make stone tools to, like, when did people start moving into South America,” she says.

Scientists used to think that making and using tools was an exclusively human activity, but now they know that tool use is actually not uncommon among animals.

However, the use of stone tools by primates is very rare.

A small number of chimpanzees in West Africa are known to use rocks as hammer stones, although they don’t leave many chips behind, possibly due to the type of stone they use.

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Capuchin monkeys in Brazil have been shown to crush seeds and nuts with stones – something they apparently did for hundreds of years, leaving behind their own tracks. register.

That’s why some researchers recently called a question Some of the oldest evidence is in Brazil of when humans may have entered the continent, he says that 50,000-year-old sites could have been established by monkeys rather than humans.

Capuchin monkeys also sometimes intentionally break rocks by crushing them together for unknown reasons (they also sometimes lick or smell the crushed stone).

This activity results in accumulations of chips with sharp edges that can look Like intentionally made stone tools — although those monkeys in Brazil don’t use broken flakes as a tool, scientists reported in 2016.

Some of the researchers involved in that study have now turned their attention to wild long-tailed macaques in Thailand. These monkeys routinely use stones as anvils and hammers to crack the nuts of the oil palm.

“They’re a little bigger than a peanut, and they can be pretty hard,” he says. Tomos ProfetWith the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “They place an oil palm nut on the anvil and use a mallet in one or both hands.”

When the monkeys repeatedly try to hit the nut, they sometimes miss and instead hit the two nuts together. This creates broken pieces of stone that collect around the anvil.

“These tools and these broken pieces looked really similar to some of the things that we would see in the early archaeological record,” Proffitt says.

David Brownan archaeologist at George Washington University, says that it was actually “somewhat disturbing” for him to walk through the woods and see hundreds of artifacts littering the ground, “and to know that no humans do it.”

If archaeologists like him had come across these tools in a million-year-old excavation, he says, “we would have personified this as, ‘Oh, they make chips to chop things up.'” “But they are not.”

No one has seen these monkeys do anything with the chips – apparently they have nothing to cut. “Once the crust falls to the ground, it stays there,” Proffitt says.

He and his colleagues analyzed more than a thousand stone fragments associated with primates, which they call “the most comprehensive data set of non-human primate road chips and primates to date.”

When they compared these stones to groups of stone artifacts, or assemblages, from ancient hominid sites in Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia, they found many similarities and overlaps.

There are ways to distinguish between stone tools that are specifically made for cutting, such as the presence of animal bones with cut marks, additional modifications to make the tools more luxurious, or evidence that the stone was imported from elsewhere specifically for the purpose of making the tools.

Also, archaeologists can look at the underlying piece of rock that was struck to produce flakes, to see if there are patterns that indicate the tool maker understood the crack patterns and was exploiting them.

However, Brown says that anyone could throw “a fair number” of macaque chips into an excavation of early human artifacts and no one would notice.

“Are the clusters that we see in the fossil record made by apes? Probably not,” says Brown.

But he thinks archaeologists should now seriously consider that some or even many of the sharp flakes they see at human sites could have been caused inadvertently.

“It’s very likely that some of the registers we assume are associated with producing sharp edges are actually a percussive technique,” he says.

In particular, Thompson believes this study could add to the debate about the nature of an artifact location in Kenya dating back to 3.3 million years ago.

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This site contains what look like very primitive stone tools that would be the oldest ever. They are so ancient that they may have been made by species even older than early humans to turn down sex.

Emma FinstoneThis new research is an interesting thing to consider when considering the first use of stone tools in human history, says a stone tool expert at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

“Could it have started when rhythmic behaviors became more prominent, and then chips came as a by-product of percussion?” Says. “Maybe this is a clue to how stone tools got started in the first place.”

Brown says that chimpanzees and other primates with sharp fangs do not need knives because they can open almost anything they want with their teeth.

While wild primates have not been observed using cutting tools, captive primates can be trained to do so, and one orangutan was untrained in captivity. notice To use a sharp stone to cut something off spontaneously.

Over the course of human evolution, teeth shrink as brain size increases, Brown says, and sharp cutting tools became necessary if humans were to exploit large game as a food source.

The growing realization that a variety of primates accidentally make stone flakes, he says, shows that when and if something needs to be cut, early human ancestors likely had plenty of possible tools on hand.

“They certainly were producing it, or perhaps they were producing it, much earlier than they actually needed it,” he says.

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