Some monkeys in Panama may have just stumbled into the Stone Age (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Some monkeys in Panama may have just stumbled into the Stone Age (2018)

newscientist.com

54 pointsAnon8427 comments

From 2018, so they're probably smelting copper by now.

More seriously, aren't there Otters that use stones to smash open shellfish? I think I'm more impressed that Orcas have decided that tipping over sailboats is a fun pastime.

Reading https://www.livescience.com/which-animals-use-stone-tools, the criterion for “entered the Stone Age” weirdly seems to be having a “recognized archaeological record of stone tool use”.

Thats lie saying “it hasn’t happened if we don’t have it on video”.

That’s because you can find tools that have obviously been shaped (e.g. napped flint) in the geological record. Distinguishing between a rock that happened to be used as a tool from any other random rock in the strata would be much harder.

Interesting, I was assuming that, unlike humans, they actually didn't have an actual tool industry (which only then would have qualified them for "Stone Age" in my book), but perhaps they have ??

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lomekwi

(Or at least for non-stone tools ?)

> they're probably smelting copper by now.

Thank you, this is exactly the kind of cerebral snark I come to HN for. I laughed out loud awkwardly while getting a pedicure with my wife. That's the good stuff.

I doubt they are as far as smelting copper, but they can be expected to at least be coding in Javascript by now, which is like Upper Paleolithic.

TFA even says "they don't fashion the tools" which means they aren't "tools" but rather "implements". Science journalism: a career that for whatever reason attracts people who are good at neither.

Also: Orangutan uses a spear to fish as local fishermen do (https://primatology.wordpress.com/2008/04/29/orangutan-photo...)

Stone age people were using things like flaked obsidian to make weapons and precise tools. These guys are smashing things with other things that happen to be stones.

> Stone age people were using things like flaked obsidian to make weapons and precise tools. These guys are smashing things with other things that happen to be stones.

So these guys are management-class stone age.

Recent PBS Nature shows are even better than what I remember from childhood. The series on primates shows a group of monkeys using rocks as tools to get food. The recent one on raptors shows an eagle knocking a sheep down a mountain. None of this is surprising if you pay attention to other animals, and it's so cool to see reminders of our similarities.

IIRC, there were chimps at one of the places that people drove through with the car windows closed to observe them who learned to break off the side-view mirrors and use them as hammers to break the car windows.

Haven't read the archive because it won't load, but from what I did read, wouldn't really say they're in the stone age unless they are doing something more advanced than hitting nuts with unmodified rocks.

If they are modifying rocks or using rocks to modify wood (like to make a stabby stick), then I'd give them the credit.

Regardless, pretty neat.

There are crows that crack nuts by placing them correctly on the road. Then, they wait for the traffic light to collect the pieces. Some crows know how to bend a little stick to pull out food out of something that's too narrow otherwise. In some sense they even create tools.

It seems like the imaginef gap between human intelligence and the one of other animals is shrinking. I guess much of this difference comes from the fact that humans accumulate so much knowledge over tens of thousands of years. Take all this away and we'd probably not be so different.

Corvids are special! I wonder what tools dinosaurs used..

Prehistoric Planet hypothesises that some used fire.

Seagulls do this by dropping things from high on the concrete.

I’ve read about that car/crow behavior many times but I’ve also read that it might be a bit exaggerated https://theconversation.com/are-crows-really-that-clever-212...

There's YT videos of crows performing as many as six distinct mechanical steps to snag a goodie.

I think we are coming to realize that we are quantitatively different rather than qualitatively different. Animals can count (but not very high). They can use tools (but not very advanced ones). They can communicate (but not very well). They can create a culture of learned behaviors (but not a very rich one).

Another thing that's quite interesting is how big the difference can be between a smart and stupid animal of the same species. To me that kinda hints at the possibility of breeding animals for intelligence.

https://archive.ph/FS3sN

I was at the zoo yesterday with my kids and I noted the fact that New World monkeys are hypothesized to have arrived in South America via a mangrove raft (or more likely multiple) and spread from Brazil outwards. Humans, meanwhile, arrived in the Western Hemisphere by way of Asia spreading south from Alaska. I speculated that perhaps the northern boundary of the range of New World monkeys is a consequence of them meeting up with southward migrating humans.

I believe new world monkeys are speculated to have crossed over about 40 million years ago - whereas humans are closer to 40,000 years ago. I think the northern boundary is just because there is a giant desert, though I admit it is still surprising to me.

And yet monkeys and apes managed to move past the Arabian desert to move as far east as Japan and across the Sahara into Morocco and elsewhere in North Africa.

(While looking to see what the range of old world primates was, I discovered that there are marsupials in Papua New Guinea including something called a Tree Kangaroo.)

The key is language and teaching, aka cultural resistance to plagues, war and starvation via distributed knowledge. Prior to that you can stumble upon knowledge again and again.

I was under the impression that many of animals can use tools not just primates. The Stone Age title is a bit hyperbolic.

From what I remember of physical anthro, the difference is that hominids fashion tools to a specific purpose. Lots of animals use implements.

But then chimps do peel down the end of sticks they use to spear termites, which by that definition would count.

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