Modern chimps dig up clues to ancient humans
Photo by Owen Booth
The discovery that chimpanzees use tools to dig up edible tubers might help us understand our human origins better.
Anthropologist Jim Moore, of the University of California San Diego, studies chimps in the Ugalla region of Tanzania. A 2007 study that he helped guide provides the first evidence that chimps use tools to forage for tubers.
Jim Moore: A lot of models of human evolution have emphasized the importance of some kind of technology that allows us to do things that other animals – other primates anyway – haven’t been able to do. And one of those, perhaps the central one is the use of sticks to dig up roots and tubers.
Tubers such as sweet potatoes and cassava were important foods for early hominids, and are still important foods in human societies today. Moore told Earth & Sky that the Ugalla chimps forage for tubers in much the same way our human ancestors might have.
Jim Moore: Finding chimpanzees doing a very primitive, very simplified version of this presents us with a way of understanding how this behavior – so important to modern human foragers – might have gotten started.
It’s a finding that, Moore said, complicates the line between human and non-human, but that might help us understand our own origins.
Jim Moore: It gives us a way of studying the behavioral side of the origin of something that was critical in allowing us to expand around the world, and allowing us to become who we are.
Adriana Hernandez-Aguilar, a graduate student at the University of Southern California at the time, made the observations of tuber-digging chimps during her dissertation research. The other co-author on the study, Travis Pickering, was involved with the tool analysis. Chimps have been known to use tools in a wide variety of contexts – poking grass stems into termites mounds and beehives, for example. But this 2007 study is the first evidence that chimps use tools to forage for tubers.
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...and here we see a chimp using a tool to crack open a human head….
...then we see how a fiction movie come true because chimps’ behavior might be a evidence that they can do the same things as what human can do.
Why would anybody come up with the idea that they came from a monkey? Who pays these scientists to study monkeys and find evidence of us coming from them. This is absurd. This article has showed me that lots of money goes to people who study monkeys. If humans came from a monkey and a monkey came from some bacteria that started in the ocean. How did this begin. You say the big bang. How did the big bang come to exist. What started the big bang. You cant answer that question. Scientists just started their timeline at the big bang and worked their way up. Nothing before that. Scientists chose not to believe in the Bible because it had no evidence. Well scientists have no evidence of anything either. Scientists can believe they came from monkeys but I belive in what the Bible says.
Deborah, great story. I am still an avid listener.
The world of chimps using tools is just a hop skip away from kids using and responding to puppets. The hand puppet, after all, is actually a tool for self-and outer referencing that is unique to human communication. Much like the chimps, we are, in effect, using puppets to arm ourselves with a tool that invites us out of ourselves further than we might otherwise venture; that re-casts the world as symbol and, with gesture, movement, involving the hand and calling upon speech and emotions. The dynamic that exists between children and puppets amounts to a wavelength of visual, audio, and social expression that is as powerful, if not more so, as the communication calls and displays of animal species.
The following quote from a New York Times article on the communication capabilities of a chimp and Alex, the late famous parrot, indicates that our forebears “armed” themselves with various media to assist in their orientation to their world as well as ours.
“They were not unusually gifted members of their respective species, Washoe and Alex. But armed with our words, they opened our minds, making us aware of the pervasive and protean nature of the linguistic impulse across species. Of the many tales they told us, the most universal tells of an early ancestor of our own, standing hundreds of thousands of years ago on a lakeshore somewhere, seeing a large winged creature drift by and signing or saying outright, in whatever language it might have been: “water,” then “bird.””
Given the need on the part of Education to discover some universal truths about children that can open people’s minds about the emotional and social needs and requirements of their developing minds, I hope you will reconsider reviewing the material I have been sending you for the past several years. As you may know, Paul D. MacLean, the scientist who coined ‘the limbic system’ and theorized the ‘triune brain’ died last month. Dr. MacLean was a good friend who embraced the work I was doing, and with whom I shared an enduring focus on the importance of play. I would greatly appreciate an opportunity to speak with you further about this work, which stands to emerge as an important step past the use of testing and control that now plagues our learning culture.
Thank you.