At The Hill:
A new study published on Friday in Science Advances suggests the possibility that a critical hallmark of human tool use happened by accident — potentially blurring the line between tool use by early humans and our primate relatives.
The Thai monkeys produced stone artifacts “indistinguishable from what we see at the beginning of the [human] archeological record — what we see as the onset of being human,” said Lydia Luncz of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, a co-author on the study.
The monkeys — long-tailed macaques — seem to have made their artifacts by accident, not by design. But in many ways, that only makes the finding more disruptive. – Saul Elbein (March 10, 2023)
That implies that some of the very old “tools” identified may not in fact be evidence of human behavior. Pseudo-tools? Stay tuned.
The paper is open access.
You may also wish to read: At VICE: Our view of intelligent [human] life upended by tools find? So it’s sort of like your great-uncle and aunt made the tools, not your great-grandparents. And that’s supposed to make all the difference? Meanwhile, another “subhuman” candidate to scratch off the list.
Best to think of them as non-human rather than “sub-human”. It helps prevent us “masters of the planet” getting ideas above our station.
How about “alt-human”? That should placate all interested parties…….
The philosophy and psychology of dehumanization suggest that it’s a mistake to treat “human” as a descriptive term in the first place.
The use of “sub-human” to refer to extinct hominids is indefensible intellectual perversion.
Monkey-Made “Tools” Cast Doubt on High Intelligence in Early Hominids
Casey Luskin – March 14, 2023
https://evolutionnews.org/2023/03/monkey-made-tools-cast-doubt-on-high-intelligence-in-early-hominids/