© Jeffrey Phillips
first emerge, setting its owner on a path distinct to that of other apes?
We paleoanthropologists have long looked to tool use as the marker - particularly the appearance of a cutting tool known as a flake.
It now seems we were wrong.
Recent research published in
Nature by a team led by Tomos Proffitt at the University of Oxford shows that capuchin monkeys regularly produce sharp-edged flakes indistinguishable from those made by early hominins.
Could these South American simians be taking the same first steps that eventually delivered the spanner, wheel and smartphone? As it turns out, no. The flakes are produced by accident when the monkeys smash rocks together. Nonetheless, the capuchins have thrown a spanner in the works for archaeologists.
Since the flakes they make are not tools at all, we can no longer assume the flakes found in the archaeological record are tools either.
We know that monkeys can make tools of other kinds, of course. Ever since British primatologist Jane Goodall's pioneering work in the 1960s, we have known our chimpanzee cousins use tools to shell nuts and to fish for termites.
Nor is tool use confined to primates. Other mammals, birds, snails, octopuses and even insects all turn out to be tool wielders. In fact, back in the 19th century an American husband and wife team, Elizabeth and George Peckham, first documented tool use outside human beings. They observed wasps hammering dirt with pebbles to build their burrows.
Comment: Another report from Queensland state in the same time frame as that above: Call for croc cull after dogs taken by reptiles in three separate attacks: