Stones excavated from a forest in the Ivory Coast.
They are 4,300 years old and have use patterns consistent with what is seen in modern chimpanzee sites.
People like to believe they are somehow more special than animals, that we are set apart from other animals in some mysterious way. For quite awhile, the differences between humans and other animals were listed as the use of a language and tool use, as well as culture. Well, it turns out that chimpanzees have been using tools for quite some time, according to a recently published paper.
Archaeologists have found ancient chimpanzee stone tools that are thousands of years older than their previous oldest discoveries. This discovery suggests that chimpanzees may have passed cultural information regarding stone tool use from generation to generation for more than 4,000 years.
These stone tools, larger than those used by humans, are a more confortable fit for the larger and stronger chimpanzee hand, and further, they closely resemble tools used by chimps in the area today.
The find consists of the stone tools that were used to smash open nuts from the panda tree, Panda oleosa, and the flakes of stone that were chipped off by this hammering. They were found by a team led by Julio Mercader from the University of Calgary in Canada in an ancient chimpanzee settlement in the rainforest of the West African nation, Ivory Coast. The recently discovered tools date back to 4,300 years ago, the research team reports.
Although panda nuts are found across Africa, only West African chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, crack them open with granite stones. After steadying the nut against a cracking post, usually the nook of a tree stump, the chimpanzees then use a stone to break them open. Because only Western chimpanzees exhibit this behavior, and because this behavior differs from that of the humans that lived in the area, it is possible that the chimpanzees' capacity for tool use was inherited from a common ancestor of chimps and humans, the authors say, or alternatively, tool use might have been learnt from humans by imitation.
"What makes this find interesting is that the rocks are so old," said Huw Barton, an archaeologist from the University of Leicester, UK. "We have no idea how far back such tools were used," he added. "For all we know stone tool use behaviour could be very ancient."
Cited story.
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This is so cool. Chimps exhibiting more reasoned behavior than most creationists.
Isn't Homo Habilis Homo only because of stone tool use?
How can they be sure they were used by chimps, rather than (say) ancestors of the current US administration?
Bob
oh bummer, i have to rewrite the story a little to make sure that Bob's question was answered in the story.
basically, they know these stones are chimp tools because they closely resemble chimp stone tools in use today. they also are similar, but not identical, to human stone tools at use in the past -- the biggest difference being that these stones are much larger than human stone tools, and thus, are better suited for the larger and stronger chimpanzee hands.
habilis was habilis because of the tool use, and was Homo mainly because of cranial features.
I could make a comment about the chimps being better knappers than some of the people who used to live around Phoenix 1,000 years ago, but that would be just plain mean.