Re: What did AAT Supposedly eat?

Phillip Bigelow (n8010095@henson.cc.wwu.edu)
Mon, 16 Jan 1995 18:45:12 GMT

patdooley@aol.com (Pat Dooley) writes:

>> <pb> wrote
>...
>>and use clubs in warfare against other troups. Tool-making seems to
>>be a primitive condition in the pan-hominid clade; in fact, this
>indicates
>>that the common ancestor of chimps and proto-humans was also a tool-user.
>...
>Surely you mean tool-using rather than tool making. Picking up a stick
>or straw or ripping a branch off a tree hardly constitutes tool making.

>Pat D

Yes, that should have been typed "tool-use". Although it could be argued
that ripping branches off of a tree constitues tool-making, simply because
the branch is modified from it's prior state (that of being on the tree,
looking pretty) to a new state (as a weapon, ergonomically useful to the
chimp). Breaking the branch could be construed by some anthropologists as a
form of crude crafting.

Kanzi, a captive bonobo chimp, has copied humans, and has crafted stone
cutting blades from rounded stones by throwing one against another. Kanzi
then will use the newly-formed tool to cut various things. (This was
documented on a 1993? broadcast of the PBS science series NOVA. I believe
the title of the show was _Can Apes Talk?_).
<pb>

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