Female Chimps Spear Bush Babies!

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"