brute are lovely when they do people things . It ’s a scientific fact . But the list of “ people things ” just keeps on shrinking . Other beast can check score , name their baby , scan our locution , and even register our mammogram results . The latest dent in our dominance come good manners of Brazilian ringtail rapscallion , who , as it bend out , have been sharpen stones into human - style hammer for a long , long sentence . A report on the findings was published in the journalNature .
researcher in Brazil have had their eye on the whiskered capuchin ( Sapajus libidinosus)for some clip now and have ascertain that despite a varied diet , the little monkeys spend a pot of energy acquiring one particular food : cashews . To enter the sweet meat inside the Anacardium occidentale ’s tough plate , capuchins developed their own specialised peter , which they ’ve been using now forat least 700 years .
The team now reports that those same monkeys may have been inadvertently messing with the timeline of human issue . In addition to their Anacardium occidentale bashing , the researcher say , the ringtail will also pound one rock against another . This Harlan F. Stone - on - rock rhythm section ( as the researchers call it ) chips aside pieces of both rock , sharpening them in the process — and producing consequence that expect an terrible lot like early human cutting peter .
The researcher could n’t recite why the rapscallion were smashing rocks . They did use some of the newly broken stones as hammers , but they did n’t use the sharpened parts . About half of the time after break a rock-and-roll , a scallywag mason would lick or sniff it , which suggests that they might be after essential mineral they ca n’t get any other way .
These findings have pretty strong conditional relation for both primate phylogenesis and archaeologic inquiry . Before this , hominins ( the chemical group of primates that let in humans and our homo - corresponding root ) were the only known animals to make this character of pecker .
“ Our understanding of the fresh engineering adopted by our former ancestor help shape our view of human phylogeny , ” co - generator Michael Haslam of the University of Oxford articulate in a statement . “ The growth of sharply - edged stone cock that were fashion and forge to create a cutting tool was a big part of that storey . The fact that we have discovered monkeys can produce the same final result does throw a bit of a spanner in the works . ”
It also makes scientists wonder about certain cache of tools allegedly made by early humans . In an resultant commentary in the same way out ofNature , paleontologist Hélène Rochecalledthe research a “ shattering discovery . ” She noted that we have mickle of corroborate evidence showing that artefact from the former African Stone Age were indeed made by hoi polloi . But there have been some inquiry about the origin of tool from the Late Pleistocene epoch ( between 40,000 and 20,000 years ago ) , and the result might well be “ monkey . ”Know of something you consider we should cover ? Email us attips@mentalfloss.com .
