Fascinating piece in Le Monde yesterday (not online) about finding chimpanzee “tools” that are more than 4,000 years old.
Before this study, chimpanzees were first observed using stone tools in the 19th century. Now, thanks to this new archaeological find, tool use by chimpanzees has been pushed back thousands of years. The authors suggest this type of tool use could have originated with our common ancestor, instead of arising independently among hominins and chimpanzees or through imitation of humans by chimpanzees.
John Hawks finds the study solid, which is good enough for me.
I found a comment in the Le Monde article by the inevitable critic of the study curious. Helene Roche, from CNRS at Nanterre, was quoted as saying “Pourquoi minimiser l’apport de l’homme.” (Why minimise the contribution of humans?)
Why is it that people have to try so hard to say we aren’t animals – are totally separate from the world from which we emerged?
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