In the Brazilian forests, the forests of West Africa and in Thailand beaches, archaeologists have discovered awesome tools made of stone.
It is the result of manual skill that makes them special. In fact, a layman may even find it difficult to identify them as tools. They either are remarkable for their age, as they seem to date from the same time as the pyramids in Egypt. – And not the pre-history
What makes these devices so special is that the hands that built and used they were not human.
These appliances were manufactured by chimpanzees and monkeys. And the places where they were found are the foundation of a brand new area of Science:. Archeology of primates
Technology use
The tools are rudimentary. The hammer of a chimp or a monkey at all looks like an old ax made by prehistoric man.
But the important thing is that these primates developed a culture that routinely made the use of a technology. This means they entered his Stone Age.
Until a few decades ago, biologists believed that man was the only species that makes extensive use tools. But we now know that many mammals, birds, fish and even insects use objects in their habitat to make their lives easier
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Many primates do the same, but, as a rule, do not turn stones into tools.
“orangutans, bonobos and gorillas have used tools of plant origin but have never been observed using stones,” said Michael Haslam of the University Oxford, UK, and leader of the Primarch project (acronym for Archaeology Primate).
According to him, it is still a mystery why the stone tools are rarely used by great apes. But that may be linked to the fact that these species spend most of their time in trees. “Plants are ubiquitous in the habitat of the primates, but stones do not,” Haslam said.
This means that even if a large particularly intelligent primate start using stone tools, there is enough material around to that tradition begins to be imitated by others in the group and is transmitted to future generations.
However, chimpanzees in West Africa appear to, yes, have managed to pass forward its technology with stones, which they use to open nuts and other oilseeds.
Far from the man
The “traditional” archeology is based on the idea that we can recognize human behaviors through the artifacts they left behind.
“Archaeologists of primates,” led by Christophe Bösch in Evolutionary Anthropology Institute in Leipzig, Germany, applied these principles to tools of chimpanzees.
In the forests of the Ivory Coast, he and his team excavated a ground area to a depth of 1 meter, revealing numerous artifacts in stone.
Some of these objects were worked with a precision that only man possesses. But other marks suggest that they were used in a more gross fashion, as a tool to open nuts, as well as chimpanzees region do today
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To Bösch, the Stone Age of chimpanzees began in that period, about 4300 years, or even earlier.
Chimpanzees are our closest living relatives. But as only this community in Ivory Coast was observed using tools, it can be concluded that this ability arose after communities in central and West Africa split, between 500,000 and 1 million years ago, according to Haslam.
It also seems that the Stone Age these chimpanzees is totally different from the Age of human stone.
For centuries there have been reports of that some Brazilian capuchin monkey species use stone tools, something that was confirmed by a 2004 study.
So do the long-tailed monkeys ( fasciularis Macaca ) in Thailand, according to research published in May.
None of these species is close to the man in the evolutionary tree of primates. Therefore, scientists believe that different species have developed their techniques independently.
For Haslam, both capuchin monkey as the Thai monkey They would have been able to transmit the use of tools for the new generations. This means that there is a deep history of application of stone in at least three primate besides man.
Last May, archaeologists in Kenya revealed the details of one of the tools in the oldest rock ever produced by ancestral Man, found in deposits of 3.3 million years.
According to the researchers, these tools were produced using techniques similar to those applied by today’s chimpanzees and monkeys. Ie. To study these primates can give us clues about human behavior in pre-history
Differences in the brain
The discovery in Kenya also said that 700,000 years after the tools found, the man had already adapted their techniques. First, it began to deliberately modify the stones to make it sharper, for example.
About 1 million years later appeared the first bifaces, with carefully carved blades.
But why did our ancestors learned to produce more sophisticated tools, so long as chimpanzees and monkeys still seem to be far from improving their techniques?
A first idea would be that our hands have evolved more quickly, allowing the manipulation of objects. But a study by George Washington University (USA) suggests that in fact human hands have changed less than those of chimpanzees in the last million years.
“In terms of proportion of length, human hands are more primitive than those of chimpanzees, “said Sergio Almécija, leader of the study. “So it is possible that the difference is in their brains.”
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“The ability to create stone tools requires more cognitive skills, so that the individual recognizes that it is a useful object but also to create it from scratch, “says Alexandra Rosati, Harvard University.
The fact that the human brain is greater may have contributed to this rapid progress. And the primatologist Richard Wrangham believes that this increase in size is due to the development of cooking.
“larger brains require more energy, and the act of cooking increases the energy coming from food, compared to a raw diet “Rosati said.
In a series of experiments, researchers found that chimpanzees can enjoy the benefits of cooking.
Of course, even these animals learn to control the fire (if it ever will do), you can not apply that assessment. But the work of Rosait suggests that they are also present in the chimpanzee brain pathways that allowed our ancestors to develop more advanced tools.
For Haslam, it is possible that these animals have not yet reached the limits of its technological capacity . But they might not have a chance to advance in their Stone Age.
“We have reduced these populations dramatically by hunting and habitat destruction,” says Haslam. “Smaller populations can not spread and maintain complex technologies as effectively as a large group would.”
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