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Comment by jberryman | Hacker News Reader

> Tool use, once thought to be the distinctive hallmark of human intelligence, has been identified in a wide variety of animals in recent decades.

I don't get this. What would prompt a scientist to make such a claim, especially when something as simple as smashing an animal against a rock counts as tool use?

I was at the zoo watching a gorilla for 5 minutes and saw it repeatedly throw a stick into a tree to knock down leaves and eat them. I find it hard to believe that in the millennia of recorded observations of animals, that no one observed a single instance of rock-bashing or stick-throwing.

Edit: I can't find much information on wikipedia, but the article on tools ends with

> Now the unique relationship of humans with tools is considered to be that we are the only species that uses tools to make other tools

I guess until we find out we're not?

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>I find it hard to believe that in the millennia of recorded observations of animals, that no one observed a single instance of rock-bashing or stick-throwing.

Pliny's Natural History, which every natural philosopher and biologist in the west up until the 18th century likely read, is full of observations of interesting and apparently more than instinctual animal behavior, including the use of stones by ravens to raise water level in a jug (the observation at the root of the well-known fable by Aesop).

Against the long tradition of seeing humans as in some essential way distinct from animals (by virtue of tool use, or speech, or reason, or compassion, and so on) there is a counter-tradition (from Empiricus to Montaigne) of denying the distinction, and that tradition has collected gobs of anecdotes and observations of apparent reason, communication and tool use).

That's awesome. Thanks for the background.

Maybe it’s because humans are better at dealing with absolutes than matters of degree?

It’s true, tool use is a special property of humans. It’s not unique but it is special. Animals don’t commonly use tools, certainly not with the sophistication of humans. Tool use is one of those things that makes us different – combined with all the other things that make us different.

If you were to write a list of human properties you would definitely include tool use and it would even be pretty high up the list, as opposed to other properties that are much more common and boring (like, for example, live birth).

It’s easy to misinterpret what those properties actually mean, to turn them into unique properties. Sure, humans wouldn’t be humans without tool use, but that doesn’t mean that they must be the only ones using tools.

Perhaps 'once thought' here should be understood as meaning, 'once thought by children and laypeople, based on the simplifying just-so stories traditionally told them'.

For example, I 'once thought' tool use was uniquely human, having had that bit of folklore orally passed to me by some authority figure – or maybe even just another child; the provenance of one's first coarse understandings of the world is not always clear. The details get filled in later, if you're paying attention.

A popular/journalistic account can very easily confuse 'new to me' or 'new to laypeople' as if it indicated fresh discoveries.

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