February 7,
2019, Max Planck
Society
Humans
consider themselves as the tool user par excellence. Previous work comparing
human tool use skills to that of other species tended to place the animals in
artificial conditions far removed from their natural environments. Such
comparisons disadvantage the animals and lead to underestimating the tool use
demonstrated by wild populations. In a first comparison between individuals of
two groups of humans and chimpanzees cracking nuts in their natural
environment, researchers recently tested how quickly and how completely a
technique was acquired by the offspring of the two species.
The
Taï chimpanzees in
Côte d"Ivoire, famous for their nut-cracking behavior, were compared to
the Mbendjele BaYaka people, who also habitually crack the same species of nuts,
Panda oleosa, in the forest of the Republic of Congo. Following Mbendjele women
groups as they foraged in the forest, the scientists used the same measures of
efficiencies as used previously on the Taï chimpanzees to observe how the
technique is acquired by both groups in the forest.
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