Capuchin Monkeys In Brazil Use Stone Tools For At Least 700 Years
Capuchin Monkeys In Brazil Use Stone Tools For At Least 700 Years
13 July 2016, 12:11 am EDT
By Rhodi Lee
Tech Times
The primates would use hammer stones on heavier anvil stones to pound open a nut and then discard the stones in piles at the processing sites where other monkeys would also select stones they can use. The capuchins were also found to be particular with the materials they use — usually opting for smooth, hard quartzite stones as hammers and opting for flat sandstones for anvils.
Haslam and colleagues also made excavations at a food-processing site near cashew trees to see if the tool technology that the animals used has developed over time. Digging at the site eventually unearthed 69 stones that were used by previous generations of capuchin monkeys.
The stones have dark residues and mass spectrometry experiments revealed that these were caused by cashew nuts.
When the researchers carbon-dated the small pieces of charcoal that were found near the stones, they found that these were at least 600 to 700 years old.
This means that the stone tools that they found were already used prior to the Europeans' arrival in the New World. This converts to about 100 generations of capuchin monkeys.
"Wild capuchins at Serra da Capivara National Park (SCNP) use stones to pound open defended food, including locally indigenous cashew nuts and we demonstrate that this activity dates back at least 600 to 700 years," Haslam and colleagues wrote.
More:
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/169427/20160713/capuchin-monkeys-in-brazil-use-stone-tools-for-at-least-700-years.htm
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Many, many more photos of beautiful Capuchin Monkeys. Here:
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1321&bih=603&q=Capuchin+Monkeys&oq=Capuchin+Monkeys&gs_l=img.12..0l7j0i30l3.586.586.0.2516.1.1.0.0.0.0.147.147.0j1.1.0....0...1ac.1.64.img..0.1.145.O1KN2udMZgk#imgrc=_
Science:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/122848257
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