Capuchin monkeys at Serra de Capivara National Park in Brazil have been discovered to use stone tools to crack open seeds and nuts for food. A new study shows that these monkeys actually have been using stone tools for the past 3,000 years. These make capuchin monkeys the oldest non-human tool site of its kind outside of Africa.
Serra da Capivara’s tools alone show long-term variation, a milestone for archaeology outside the human lineage. There, the stone tools vary in size over time, suggesting that the area’s capuchins may have been adapting their tool use to eat foods of varying hardnesses.
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Understanding capuchin tool use could help reveal the origins of the practice in other primate groups, including the earliest members of the human lineage. The oldest known stone tools—deliberately flaked blades—date back 3.3 million years and are attributed to either Australopithecus afarensis or Kenyanthropus platyops, two ancient species of human relatives.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
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