Image courtesy of Lydia V. Luncz.
Joel Kontinen
How many of the world´s stone
flakes tools were actually made by men? Now it seems that a lot was made by macaques, some
were almost identical to those made by men, dating to at least 3 million years
ago. A research team in Thailand witnessed
monkeys accidentally creating flakes as they struck nuts between two stones.
They were the same as macaques
made today. Lydia Luncz at the
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany SAYS
that capuchins, chimpanzees and long-tailed macaques are the only non-human
primates known to use stone tools in the wild,
Monkey tales or Darwinian just-so-stories still flourish in science journals although it is questionable whether they have anything to do with real science.
Lesté-Lasserre, Christa, 2023. Stone flakes made by monkeys cast doubt on ancient human 'tools' New Scientist 10 March
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