Stone flakes made by modern monkeys trigger big questions about early humans
Monkeys using stones to crack open nuts generate many stone flakes accidentally that look exactly like the ones archaeologists have long thought early humans made intentionally as tools. Oops.
When monkeys in Thailand use stones as hammers and anvils to help them crack open nuts, they often accidentally create sharp flakes of rock that look like the stone cutting tools made by early humans.
This surprising discovery, described in the journal Science Advances, has archaeologists wondering if they need to rethink their assumptions about some of the stone artifacts produced by early human ancestors over a million years ago.
"You have a bunch of nonhuman primates that are creating objects that look a lot like the kinds of things that we have wanted to exclusively assign to the behavior of humans and human ancestors," says , a paleoanthropologist with Yale University who wasn't on the team that did this
