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+--- Thread: Capuchin monkeys’ stone-tool use has evolved over 3,000 years (/thread-7272.html)
Capuchin monkeys’ stone-tool use has evolved over 3,000 years - C C - Jun 25, 2019
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/capuchin-monkey-stone-tool-use-evolution-3000-years
INTRO: South American capuchin monkeys have not only hammered and dug with carefully chosen stones for the last 3,000 years, but also have selected pounding tools of varying sizes and weights along the way. Capuchin stone implements recovered at a site in northeastern Brazil display signs of shifts during the last three millennia between a focus on dealing with either relatively small, soft foods or larger, hard-shelled edibles, researchers report. These discoveries, described online June 24 in Nature Ecology & Evolution, are the first evidence of changing patterns of stone-tool use in a nonhuman primate.
“It’s likely that local vegetation changes after 3,000 years ago led to changes in capuchin stone tools,” says archaeologist Tomos Proffitt of University College London. The new findings raise the possibility that chimpanzees and macaque monkeys, which also use stones to pound and dig, have shifted their tool-use styles over the long haul, perhaps in response to climate and habitat changes, Proffitt says. (MORE)