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- Animal Tool-Use
Current Biology, Volume 20, Issue 23, 7 December 2010, Pages R1032-R1039
Amanda Seed and Richard Byrne
SummaryThe sight of an animal making and using a tool captivates scientists and laymen alike, perhaps because it forces us to question some of our ideas about human uniqueness. Does the animal know how the tool works? Did it anticipate the need for the tool and make it in advance? To some, this fascination with tools seems arbitrary and anthropocentric; after all, animals engage in many other complex activities, like nest building, and we know that complex behaviour need not be cognitively demanding. But tool-using behaviour can also provide a powerful window into the minds of living animals, and help us to learn what capacities we share with them — and what might have changed to allow for the incontrovertibly unique levels of technology shown by modern humans.
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- Animal Behavior: The Right Tool for the Job
Current Biology, Volume 19, Issue 3, 10 February 2009, Pages R124-R125
Sarah F. Brosnan
SummaryA recent study has shown that wild capuchins choose a functionally appropriate tool from a set of apparently similar tools, suggesting a surprising level of understanding of the contingencies of tool use.
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- Aquarboreal ancestors?
Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Volume 17, Issue 5, 1 May 2002, Pages 212-217
Marc Verhaegen, Pierre-François Puech and Stephen Munro
AbstractAccording to biomolecular data, the great apes split into Asian pongids (orang-utan) and African hominids (gorillas, chimpanzees and humans) 18–12 million years ago (Mya) and hominids split into gorillas and humans–chimpanzees 10–6 Mya. Fossils with pongid features appear in Eurasia after c. 15 Mya, and fossils with hominid fossils appear in Africa after c. 10 Mya. Instead of the traditional savannah-dwelling hypothesis, we argue that a combination of fossil (including the newly discovered Orrorin, Ardipithecus and Kenyanthropus hominids) and comparative data now provides evidence showing that: (1) the earliest hominids waded and climbed in swampy or coastal forests in Africa–Arabia and fed partly on hard-shelled fruits and molluscs; (2) their australopith descendants in Africa had a comparable locomotion but generally preferred a diet including wetland plants; and (3) the Homo descendants migrated to or remained near the Indian Ocean coasts, lost most climbing abilities, and exploited waterside resources.
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Copyright © 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd All rights reserved.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 5, Issue 3, 98-99, 1 March 2001
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Sex differences in throwing: monkeys having a fling
Fast and accurate throwing was undoubtedly important to ancestral hominids, and was subject to sexual-selection pressures that generated a male advantage in throwing accuracy that persists in modern humans. The balance of evidence, including that from a recent comparative study of throwing in humans and capuchin monkeys, suggests that high-performance throwing involves unique adaptations in the domains of spatial targeting, precision timing, and multi-joint motor control.