Monkeys from Thailand are using “tools” similar to the ancient hominins

(Lydia V. Luncz https://bit.ly/3yA4VhL)

An international team of researchers has collected more than 1,100 artifacts in places where crabeater macaques pricked oil palm fruit with stones, scientists.

In addition to chippers and anvils, the scientists led by Tomos Proffitt of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology found 219 randomly made chips.

Comparing them with artifacts about 3.3-1.5 million years old, archaeologists have concluded that some don’t differ from flakes and chips made by hominins in the pre-Olduvian and Olduvai eras.

One of the most important cultural innovations in our history was the regular manufacture and use of stone tools.

To date, artifacts from the Lomekwi-3 site in Kenya, whose age is about 3.3 million years, are considered the oldest and extremely primitive tools.

However, they began to systematically make stone products using a fairly standard technology later - with the advent of the so-called Olduvai culture.

Until recently, archaeologists believed that this happened about 2.6 million years ago.

But new finds made at the Nyayanga site in Kenya may push this boundary back as far as three million years ago.

While some researchers are speculating about which hominins were the first to make tools, others are studying the ability of modern animals to do something similar.

For example, common chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) can use stones as hammers to crack nuts.

Another example is the black-striped capuchin (Sapajus libidinosus) living in South America, that sometimes crack stones that can be confused with man-made tools.

Probably, the finds made in the Brazilian area of Pedra Fudrada are associated with their activities.

Some scientists considered those rocks to be evidence that a person could have ended up in America as early as 50-32 thousand years ago,

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TOOLS
However, now Proffitt‘s team has drawn attention to other stone-using primates, the crabeater monkey (Macaca fascicularis), which was recently found to be using stones as sex toys.

The researchers observed macaques living on one of the islands in southern Thailand.

These monkeys use tools to split the fruits of the oil palm (Elaeis guineensis). Primates placed them on stone anvils and struck them with their chippers.

In 2017 and 2021, scientists visited 40 sites where monkeys pricked fruits and found 1,119 stone artifacts there, which they subjected to a thorough analysis.

The researchers noted that macaques used stones as bumpers, with a mass ranging from 35 to 920 grams.

However, their attention was attracted by numerous chips accidentally obtained by the monkeys: 219 such artifacts (19.6%).

(Proffitt et al/ Science Advances, 2023 https://bit.ly/3JB9GOw)

The scientists compared these items with finds made at African Plio-Pleistocene sites dated between 3.3 and 1.5 million years ago.

Among other things, the sample included items from the Olduvai Gorge, Koobi Fora, and Lady Geraru sites.

Comparative analysis showed that often the chips made by macaques did not differ significantly from the flakes and fragments found at archaeological sites of the pre-Olduvian and Olduvai eras.

According to the team, hypothetically, ancient hominins could have engaged in activities similar to macaques: breaking nuts and getting random chips.

Then they moved to purposefully splitting the stones to use them as tools.

Sources:

• Science Advances: https://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.ade8159
• Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-stone-wielding-macaques-can-tell-us-about-early-human-tool-use/
• Eureka Alert: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/982264

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