These are questions on the coronary heart of a new research led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, which may additionally disrupt a lot of Stone Age archaeology, if not deliberately. The workforce studied long-tailed macaque monkeys in a Thai nationwide park. The monkeys are prolific bashers of palm nuts utilizing a rudimentary however efficient system: a smaller stone (termed a hammerstone) bashed in opposition to a bigger one, the “anvil,” with a nut in between. The truth that the monkeys, together with Capuchin monkeys and chimpanzees, use this technique is unremarkable, nevertheless.

What has despatched reverberations by science is the invention that when the macaque instruments fracture and chip, they create “flakes” that intently resemble stone age instruments, which raises new questions.

Historic Instruments or Trendy Stones?

So right here’s the brand new warning: Flakes that come from areas fraught with “percussive” bashing “shouldn’t be assumed to be completely the results of intentional flake manufacturing,” the research says.

In different phrases, a million-year-old hominin software won’t be what it seems.

The workforce collected 1,119 stone items from the park, together with many stone flakes that may have usually attracted a number of assumptions: An individual made them who understood how rocks fracture and that the particular person possessed high-quality motor abilities. Whereas the monkeys possess the latter, the previous would not apply, scientists imagine.

To additional muddy the waters, each monkeys and early people have left behind related flake deposits, though the hominins additionally drew on helpful stone sorts not frequent to the native space, an essential marker.

Analyzing the Stone Flakes

As a statistical experiment, the researchers in contrast the macaque flakes to a bunch of instruments from the Oldowan, a 2.5-million-year-old tradition that’s the oldest to have used instruments. Residents of modern-day Africa, they used roughly hewn “choppers” for absolutely anything, together with animal butchering and plant chopping. The experiment discovered that given shut similarities with the macaque flakes, 30 to 70 p.c of the Oldowan-made flakes may very well be swapped with the monkey-made flakes.

“Our research reveals that stone software manufacturing shouldn’t be distinctive to people and our ancestors,” says lead creator Tomos Proffitt in a press launch, a researcher on the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

A 2017 research of the identical monkeys discovered that additionally they used stones to crack open shellfish, and the researchers there urged this amounted to a kind of cultural transference. However the paper discovered this tradition was fairly restricted because the macaques lacked any discerning choice for rock form or weight.

The brand new research additionally builds on a 2016 paper that discovered related behaviors, and related tool-producing, amongst a bunch of capuchin monkeys in Brazil.

Hominin instruments could have began out this manner, with one rock bashing in opposition to one other, scientists have argued. And so they now estimate the earliest human use of instruments at about 3 million years in the past, earlier even than the Oldowan.