Macaques use stones as hammers to break open food such as shells and nuts.
Lydia V. Luncz
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Lydia V. Luncz
Macaques use stones as hammers to break open food such as shells and nuts.
Lydia V. Luncz
When monkeys in Thailand use stones as hammers and anvils to help them crack nuts, they often accidentally create sharp flakes of rock that look like stone tools made by ancient humans.
This is a surprising discovery, which is described in the journal Journal of SciencesArchaeologists wonder if we need to think about the origins of certain stone artifacts produced by older humans millions of years ago.
“You have a bunch of non-human primates that create things that look a lot like the kinds of things that we wanted to assign only to the behavior of humans and human ancestors,” says Jessica Thompson, a paleoanthropologist with Yale University, who was “t on the team that did this new research.”
She notes that the manufacture of sharp rock-cutting tools, which could date back as far as 3.3 million years ago, has long been seen as a key technological innovation in human history, one that has been shrouded in a host of assumptions about evolution. characteristics of individual people.
But now, says Thompson, archaeologists will have to grapple with the question of whether the sharp stones were made on purpose or by accident.
“It has ramifications that go as far as when the first stone tools ever came from the first humans, like when humans started moving into South America,” he says.
Scientists used to think that making and using tools was only a human activity, but now they know that the use of tools is actually not uncommon in animals.
However, the use of stone tools by primates is quite rare.
A small number of chimpanzees in West Africa are known to use stone hammers, although many do not leave their burrows, possibly because of the type of stone they use.
And capuchin monkeys in Brazil have been shown to bury seeds and nuts with stones — something they seem to have been doing for hundreds of years, leaving their archaeological record.
As a result, some researchers have recently called into question some of the earliest evidence in Brazil of when humans entered the continent, saying that the ancient sites could have been created by monkeys instead of humans from 50,000 years ago.
Capuchin monkeys also sometimes hit rocks on purpose for unknown reasons (sometimes they even lick or smell a broken stone).
This activity creates accumulations of sharp-edged stones that can look like stone tools on purpose — even though monkeys in Brazil never 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 macaques in Thailand, long gone white. These monkeys used to use stones as anvils and hammers to crack the nuts of the oil palms.
“They are a little bigger than peanuts, and they can be quite hard,” says Tomos Proffitt, at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “And they throw the nut of the palm upon the anvil, and use the hammer in one or both hands.”
As monkeys often try to whack a nut, sometimes they fail and hit two stones at once. He makes pieces of stone that collect around the anvil.
“We looked at these tools and these fragments of fragments similar to some of what we would see in an ancient archaeological record,” says Proffitt.
David Braun, an archaeologist at George Washington University, says it “disturbed him a little” to walk into the woods and see hundreds of artisanal artifacts littering the ground “and to know that no people do this.”
An anvil and a hammer were used by long-tailed macaques to crack nuts.
Lydia V. Luncz
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Lydia V. Luncz
An anvil and a hammer were used by long-tailed macaques to crack nuts.
Lydia V. Luncz
If archaeologists had come across tools like this in excavations millions of years ago, he says, “we’d want to recognize this as, ‘Oh, the flakes make things fall.’ But it is not.
No one has seen these monkeys have anything to do with fluff – they don’t have anything they want to cut. “As soon as the lake falls to the ground, it just stays there,” says Proffitt.
He and his colleagues have analyzed thousands of silver stones associated with apes, which they call “the most extensive data set of non-human primates and modern stone fossils.”
They compared these stones with collections of stone artifacts, or groups of ancient human ancestors in Tanzania, Kenya, and Ethiopia, and found many similarities and overlaps.
There are ways to distinguish stone tools made specifically for cutting, such as the presence of animal bones with incised markings, or additional modifications to make more fancy tools, or evidence of stone imported from another location specifically to make tools.
Also, archaeologists can look at the core of the rock that was struck to produce the butcher, to see if there are patterns suggesting that they understood the forms of the fracture tools and exploited them.
However, Braun says that a person could throw “a large number” of macaque-derived artifacts into an excavation of ancient human artifacts and no one would notice.
“Are the churches we see in the fossils of monkeys? Probably not,” says Braun.
But he thinks that archaeologists should now seriously consider seeing some or even a lot of sharp fluff in human sites could have been done through ignorance.
“It’s entirely possible that some of the paper we’re putting together could be a cutting-edge technology that could be disruptive,” he says.
In particular, Thompson thinks this study can add to the debate about the nature of one archaeological site in Kenya that dates back to 3.3 million years ago.
This site has what appears to be the earliest stone tools ever found. They are so ancient that they were made by a more ancient species than the first humans Man race
Emma Finestone, a stone tool expert at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, says this new research is interesting to remember when thinking about the earliest use of stone tools in human history.
“Could it be that the striking behavior started out as more prominent, and then the butcher was produced as a striking style?” says. “Perhaps the writer has a sense of how stone tools were first introduced.”
Chimpanzees and other primates don’t need sharp canine knives because they can tear apart almost anything they want with their teeth, says Braun.
While wild primates have not been observed using tools, captive primates can be trained to do so, and an untrained orangutan in captivity has been observed to spontaneously use a sharp stone to cut something.
Over the course of human evolution, teeth grew in size as brain size increased, says Braun, and cutting tools became an acute necessity if humans were going to hunt large game for food.
The growing realization that various primates make tears in the event of a stone, he says, shows that when and if something needs to happen, ancient, older people probably had plenty of possible tools inside them.
“They certainly produced, or could have produced,” he says, “long before they needed it.”
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