What Is The Origin Of The Monkeys Eating Bananas Stereotype – Wild monkeys in Brazil’s Serra da Capivara region have been making stone tools for at least 3,000 years, and their technology has evolved over time, scientists report.
Tool use among capuchin monkeys in Brazil’s Serra da Capivara National Park goes back thousands of years: a new study has found that these monkeys used stone tools to process their food 3,000 years ago, making them the oldest non-human ape species. products. Such a place outside of Africa.
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Described today in Nature Ecology & Evolution, the area contains layers of rounded stones that capuchins in the area have formed over time to uncover seeds and nuts. Other non-human resources sites are written both within and outside of Africa; the oldest known, a chimpanzee site in Côte d’Ivoire, is over 4,000 years old. But only tools from the Serra da Capivara show long-term diversity, an archaeologically significant period without human origins. There, the size of the stone tools varied over time, suggesting that local Capuchins may have adapted their tool use to eat foods of varying complexity.
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“What’s interesting about the possibility of studying archeology at ape tool sites is that we as animals are no different from having a well-structured and detailed archaeological record,” said study co-author Tomos Proffitt, a postdoctoral researcher. University College London. “These excavations of capuchins show that this type of wildlife in Brazil has its own archaeological history; they have an ancient history of tool use.
Understanding capuchin tool use can help determine the origins of the practice in other animal groups, including early humans. The oldest known stone tools – deliberately sharpened knives – date back 3.3 million years and belong to Australopithecus afarensis or Kenyanthropus platyops, two relatives of early humans.
The capuchin archaeological site is located in the Serra da Capivara National Park in Brazil, where monkeys today use rocks to open cashew nuts.
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But before early hominids deliberately chipped chunks of stone to use as tools, they would have used unmodified stone to process food, much like today’s Serra da Capivara capuchins. By studying the capuchins’ tool use, researchers can get a better idea of what to look for at other, older sites.
“I’m always excited when new evidence emerges about the complexity of animal behavior,” says Erin Marie Williams-Hatala, an evolutionary biologist at Chatham University who studies the biomechanics of early stone tool use. “I think we’ve been distracted for years — decades — by creating false narratives about what makes us different from other apes.”
Tool use has long been considered a human activity, but decades of research have shown this to be incorrect. Several bird species use sticks and branches as tools; chimpanzees can make “spears” to hunt mammals. Orangutans have come up with a clever solution to dehydration: they chew the plant and use it like a sponge, sucking up hard-to-reach water and squeezing it out of their mouths. (Read more about using non-human animal tools.)
Left: To crack open cashews, capuchins use round stone hooks about an inch in diameter to the size of a human fist. They use their whole body with this power, like human baseball pitchers.
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Right: Capuchins pound cashew nuts against 20cm diameter stone ‘anwas’ or roots of cashew trees.
Likewise today, capuchins of the Serra da Capivara break the hard shell of cashew nuts with round quartzite tubes about an inch in diameter to the size of a human fist. When they hit the cashews with stones—on the roots of trees or on stone carts—they left invisible, brown marks on the cashews as evidence of their blows.
For centuries, locals and visitors to Brazil have talked about capuchins’ tool use, and scientists have known for decades that capuchins can use tools in captivity and in laboratory experiments. But it wasn’t until 2004 that they officially documented the wild behavior.
“Local people have known about it for a long time,” said lead study author Thiago Falotico, a zoologist at the University of São Paulo.
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After a new study about ten years ago, a team of researchers began excavating sites in the Serra da Capivara to see how far back tool use went. In 2016, researchers found faint evidence of Capuchin stone tools dating back about 700 years in one area. But there was no reason why the old material couldn’t be there, so the team continued to dig.
After four rounds of digging, the team determined the soil to be about 3,000 years old based on radiocarbon dating of soil layers and still found Capuchin stone tools. Interestingly, Falotico and Proffitt’s team also saw changes in tool usage. Until some time, about 560 years ago, the Capuchins in the area carried with them small stones that did great damage – a sign that they often missed their target. Researchers believe that capuchins ate less food at that time.
Since then, the capuchins of the Serra da Capivara have been using very large stones, which means they eat a very heavy diet. Falotico archeology has shown that the Capuchins have followed their standard tool sizes for the past three hundred years or so, in line with their current strategy of destroying hard cashews.
Why did the native capuchins change their diet? Proffitt and Falotico cannot say for sure. Different groups of capuchins, each with their own flavor, may have lived in this part of the Serra da Capivara for thousands of years. Changes may also reflect changes in the site’s plant community.
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Williams-Hatala, who was not involved in the paper, points out that we still don’t know what the ancient capuchins ate. There are no cashew remains on the ancient implements, which may mean that the capuchins did not eat cashews or that the cashew remains degraded over time. He also notes that the general technique of Capuchin instruments – percussion – did not change significantly over time, so he cautions against reading too much into the differences between locations.
“What we’re talking about changes over time, but whether it’s a change in the performance of the tools or a change in behavior, I would say not,” he said.
Proffitt and Falotico plan further research, including an extensive review of how to distinguish between different types of non-human stone tools. In this way, researchers can easily interpret stone tools from different locations to their owners and understand the evolutionary basis of tool use in primates. After all, not all Capuchin groups used stone tools, so why tools from Serra da Capivara and Panama?
“What about the evolutionary history, natural sciences, and social systems of these capuchin tribes, who have been separated from their human ancestors for 38 million years? said Brendan Barrett, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “It could be its independent evolution.”
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Most importantly, researchers note the great diversity of wildlife resource use and the inevitability of capuchins evolving like human ancestors. For example, capuchins accidentally break off stone flakes when they are shelling cashew nuts, but they have never used these flakes as cutting tools in the wild, an important step in human evolution.
“If you define the ‘Stone Age’ as the period when people used stones as tools, Capuchins have their own Stone Age, and that’s not a problem,” Proffitt said. “I don’t know if this Stone Age is going to be a very serious problem.”
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