This just in. A team of scientists recently observed a small hunting party of Pan troglodytes in Senegal using sharpened spears. We’ve known for a long time that chimps fashion tools within a “foraging context,” be it cracking nuts with rocks or prodding termites with sticks. This is different, unprecedented. According to the paper published in Current Biology, these advanced Senegalese chimps of the Fongoli community are into weapons manufacturing. They start with a suitable branch, remove sundry leaves and ancillary twigs, strip bark, then gnaw one end to a hurty point for vicious thrusting and forceful impaling of prey. The victim, a nocturnal prosimian, the cute bushbaby.
Tool use has been previously defined as “the external employment of an unattached environmental object to alter more efficiently the form, position, or condition of another object, another organism, or the user itself when the user … is responsible for the proper and effective orientation of the tool.” †
To add another strange fold to the story, the researchers report that youngsters and females were wielding the spears. Typically, male chimps do the hunting. This may cause us to rethink our own tool-making evolution, possibly giving females a greater role in that department. If, that is, we’re around long enough to ponder such questions.
Today it’s bushbaby kabobs, tomorrow it’s human babys. The days of our dominance as a species have cycled to End Times. “Ho hum.” you say. “The day I see a troglodyte win Project Runway then I’ll start to worry.”
† B. Beck, Animal Tool Behavior: The Use and Manufacture of Tools by Animals, Garland Press, New York (1980).
