Who doesn’t love a capuchin monkey? I tell you, not anyone that I know. Of course they are on the high end of the cuteness scale as monkeys go, but also animals in general. They are small, and fuzzy, and they have sweet little “I’m gonna’ capuchin-that-little-face-of-yours” charm. Most people know them as the Organ Grinder monkeys. Probably my favorite capuchin-film-star EVER, was the little monkey in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Except when it ate the poison date, and died, and then I cried big capuchin tears.
Anyway. They live in the wild, where they are supposed to be. This includes Central America and South America as far south as northern Argentina. We saw some capuchins when we were in Costa Rica. I waved. They waved back. Or something.
Capuchins are tool-users. I just learned of this. They use tools when they eat, and prepare their food. They have been doing this for a long time, apparently. A new study has found that these primates have used stone tools to process their food for the past 3,000 years in a certain region in Brazil. This makes it the oldest non-human site of its kind outside of Africa.
The site contains layers of rounded stone cobbles that capuchins in the area produced over time to crack open seeds and nuts. Little monkeys with little nutcrackers. Sweet.
Scientists, those smarty ones, are using the capuchin “tool use” to help reveal the origins of the same practice in other primate groups. The science-coats want to know how it got started there, so they can also look at how the early human lines did this. Thousands and thousands of years back, through all their generations, and now into today.
The oldest known stone tools — which are deliberately flaked blades, by the way — go back as far as 3.3 million years. If you want to know who did it, I’ll tell you now, just for the record. They are either the Australopithecus afarensis or Kenyanthropus platyops, which are two ancient species of human relatives. Uncle Opithecus and Aunt Platyops, for short.
The reason I find all this so interesting, is because our animal counterparts, those good ones that we share the planet with, are tool-users, just like us.
For a long time, “tool use” was considered a human activity only. We thought we were the kings of the chain saw, and diamond-bit drill. But, we are not alone. Decades of research has exposed that as simply untrue. Several bird species — my happy crow friends — wield sticks and twigs as tools. And, then there are chimpanzees who can craft “spears” to hunt mammals. Orangutans use tools to help them hydrate. They chew up plants, spit it back out, and shape it into little sponges. They use those “sponges” to soak up hard-to-reach water. And then they squeeze it into their mouths.
Anyway, back to the capuchins. The scientists say, this 3,000 year old behavior classifies them as currently being in their own stone age. They cannot project if their “tool use” will evolve thousands of years from now, into more sophisticated tools. Which, is also very interesting.
That is, if there is still an inhabitable earth in a thousand years. Which may not be the case, if we humans have anything to do with it. Tool wielders, that we are. Chain saws, and such. Or worse. We need to quit monkeying around.
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“No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.”
― Isaac Newton
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“What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.”
― Bertrand Russell
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“I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the concrete. It’s so fuckin’ heroic.”
― George Carlin
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