Article: It took these monkeys just 13 years to learn how to crack nuts
By Colin Barras
The macaques of southern Thailand have started a new tradition. For at least a century, they have used simple stone tools to smash open shellfish on the seashore. Now the monkeys have begun using stones to crack open oil palm nuts further inland.
The finding means they may be the first non-human primates to have begun adapting their Stone Age technology to exploit a new ecological niche.
Tool use is common in the animal kingdom, but very few animals make routine use of stones as tools. Among non-human primates, just three species are known to do so: the western chimpanzees of West Africa, the bearded capuchins of Brazil and the long-tailed macaques of Thailand. However, in all three cases biologists thought the primates restricted their stone tool use to a specific environmental setting.
We keep trying to put limits on animal tool use to keep ourselves different from them and then animals keep showing us that those limits where artificial. At this point I think the only reason we having been finding stone tool use going back more then 3.3 million years is that people who know about what stone tool looks like haven't been the ones looking at things that far back.
