Female Chimps Spear Bush Babies!
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Thursday February 22, 2007 20:37
by R. Isible
New evidence of tool use originating from female chimpanzees
Current Biology reports on a population of monkeys which have been observed to use spears in their hunting of bush babies. It seems the tool use is primarily by female chimpanzees. AP have a report that captures most of the info at the link at the bottom of the page. There's also a National Geographic summary and linked video available here:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070222-chimps-spears.html
Action at a distance predation is speculated to be important for hominid evolution [1] because the problem of predicting where/how to throw an object to intercept another moving object requires large computational power in the brain (early attempts to work this out for fire-control systems in anti-aircraft batteries in WW2 led to the development of the statistical approach to communications engineering e.g. time-series and proved to be difficult).
Previous observations with chimpanzees mostly involved throwing stones to distract/scare adults from their young [2]
1. Isaac, B. (1983). African Archaeological Review 5(1), 3-17 "Throwing and human evolution"
2. Plooij, F. X. (1978). Carnivore 1, 103-106 "Tool use during Chimpanzee's bush-pig hunt"
Comments (4 of 4)
Jump To Comment: 1 2 3 4It's what's wrapped up in a whole load of annoying javascript on the national geographic site.
This is big news - no, really!
'primitive' tools lead to war, war leads to more tools and more tools lead to war.
the chimps were smart not to start an arm's race and be satisfied with sucking ants off sticks. Other primates made a complex bad choice a long time ago and now the world suffers.
we could make peace now - and aside from not driving chimps and our other cousins into extinction, we could just offer them seats on the UN Permanent Security Council. But, they wont get there until they have nukes - they will have to wait in line after the Iranians.
There is a larger issue here however - there's an athiest meme that comes from the scientific community that what separates 'us' from 'them' is that 'we' developed tools.
true, but this is shallow thinking, me thinks.
Tools are not just sticks and stones that can break another chimp's bones - but it's the babel lunacy that hurts us.
Tools are not tools without the imagination that sees them as tools.
Humans are complex symbol makers - and out of that, we conquered the world and kept the chimps in their place - remember the Hobbits of Indonesia and how we humans wiped them out? We humans don't like competition
Symbols. Making them means making more symbols to explain those symbols - and so it goes.
A rock is just a rock - until someone calls it a hammer or calls it a weapon or calls a pet.
Time to revive this thread from the past?:
Socialists: Give apes human rights
http://www.indymedia.ie/article/75708
. .. ... .. .
'Bush Babies' is not only a racist epithet (a.k.a Galago)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galago
Bush Babies: Are they With US or Are They Against Us?
Yep, I saw it on the telly!!!
Crows were given a glass bottle with a piece of food inside, and a straight piece of wire. They figured out (quite quickly if I remember correctly) that to get the food out, they had to manipulate the wire by bending one end before sticking it into the bottle to retrieve the food. Fascinating stuff... Can't give a reference to the programme as I honestly don't remember, but I think it was on Animal Planet, maybe about six months ago.
Time perhaps to open this thread too, on Bonobos - a more peaceful cousin of ours: http://www.indymedia.ie/article/77573
Dunno about the bonobos, they won't fight back. But, hey, try and capture these Chimps for bushmeat and you'll get a spear in the belly! Maybe they will form a guerilla army.
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