Monkey See, MONKEY SMASH! Are Monkeys Making Hominin-Style Stone Tools?

A capuchin monkey repeatedly smashes one rock into another in Brazil's Serra da Capivara National Park. The other monkey wears the same expression of anyone who's ever had a roommate learning to play the drums. Credit: M. Haslan. Stone tools are arguably the most important artifacts we have in telling the story of human evolution. While they're not as helpful as finding actual bones, the tools are much less fragile and can give researchers a lot of valuable insights. The way a tool was made tells us about the individual's hand strength, for example, and maybe even the toolmaker's cognition and language skills. In the absence of fossils, stone tools can be an important way to document that humans were even present at a site. But what if I told you a new study suggests that it might be bananas to assume sharp-edged stone tools are evidence of hominins? Making ...