Stone tools and Hominins

Students of anthropology have long been taught that tool-making is a human characteristic. But the social media is now abuzz with videos of monkeys using big stones to crush nuts to obtain their kernels. Jane Goodall’s elaborate research on chimpanzees has shown that they insert small twigs in ant-holes to fish them out. Ewen Callaway wrote an article in Nature on October 19, 2016 and commented that “Monkey tools raise questions over the human archaeological record”. Of special interest to anthropologists are capuchin moneys who inhabit Central and South America. They are known to make stone tools. They smash rocks over each other to make sharp stone tools. Experts conclude that these tools resemble those made by early hominins some 2.5 to 3 million years ago. Now this issue strikes at the very roots of all the human evolutionary theories. If stone tools could be made by non-humans then all the repertoire of stone tools collected by archaeologists and anthropologists may not be exclusively made by human ancestors. Detailed research is needed to pin point the differences if any in the tools made by human ancestors and those made by non-human primates. Experts have started thinking on these lines and we may hear about this delineation in the near future.