From: Spudboy100@aol.com
Date: Fri May 24 2002 - 13:10:01 MDT
Source: National Science Foundation (http://www.nsf.gov)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5
: Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:14:20 MST
Date: Posted 5/24/2002
A study of chimpanzees' use of hammers to open nuts in western Africa may
provide fresh clues to how tools developed among human ancestors. A paper
published in the May 24 issue of the journal Science documents the first
archaeological examination of a non-human primate workplace and establishes
new links between the use of tools by chimpanzees and similar developments
among human ancestors (hominids). The research was supported in part by the
National Science Foundation (NSF). The research site is in the Tai Forest,
about 375 miles west of the capital of the Ivory Coast, Abidjan. A team from
George Washington University (GWU) and the Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology of Leipzig, Germany (which provided the primary
funding for the work) studied a site where chimpanzees had carried in stone
hammers from nearby areas to open nuts on tree roots, which they used as
anvils. The researchers last fall, recovered 479 stone pieces, chips of
granite, laterite, feldspar and quartz broken from the hammers. "Some of the
stone by-products of the chimpanzee nut cracking are similar to what we see
among the technologically simplest Oldowan [hominid] sites in East Africa,"
said rainforest archaeologist Julio Mercader of GWU, the lead author of the
journal article, titled "Excavation of a Chimpanzee Stone Tool Site in the
African Rainforest." Other scholars have documented similarities between the
hammers used by chimpanzees to open nuts and those used by hominids, but no
researchers have used the techniques of human archaeology on non-human
primate sites, Mercader said. The researchers have proved "archaeology to be
a feasible method of uncovering past chimpanzee sites and activity areas in
rainforest environments. This introduces the possibility of tracing the
development of at least one aspect of ape culture through time," said
Mercader, a visiting assistant professor at GWU. Melissa Panger, a GWU
post-doctoral research fellow who receives support through NSF's Integrative
Graduate education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program, said the
discovery could help archaeologists establish new dates for tool development.
She and Christophe Boesch of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology co-authored the paper with Mercader. "We know that flaked stone
tools were used 2.5 million years ago, but stone tools may have been used by
hominids as much as 5 million years ago," Panger said. "If we look for
assemblages of stone pieces like those we have found left behind by the
chimpanzees, we can infer that those assemblages may relate to tool use, even
if we don't have the tools themselves." Mark Weiss, NSF program director for
physical anthropology said, "Understanding the activities of our early
ancestors involves a lot of detective work. Mercader, Panger and Boesch's
work is an ingenious approach to trying to tease out more information from
the archaeological record-trying to flesh out the context of the earliest
flake assemblages." Editor's Note: The original news release can be found at <A HREF="http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/02/pr0242.htm">
http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/02/pr0242.htm>