Question

For this discussion post, I want you to search primates and tool use: How did tool use begin? do all primates use tools? Why is this so important for non-human primates? In your post-I want you to tell us about the tool use you found and the primates who use it. Then, I want you to hyperlink the article, so we can see it. And then...do you think this tool use is similar to our human ancestors?

To summarize: 1. Look up primates and tool use; 2. Find an article you like, and want to share; 3. Summarize the article for us, and give us the article / webpage your found in a hyperlink; 4. Do you think this skill set is similar to those developed by our "not quite human yet" ancestors? Why or why not?

Answer 1

•Order Primates of class Mammalia includes lemurs, tarsiers, monkeys, apes, and humans. Non-human primates live primarily in the tropical or subtropical regions of South America, Africa, and Asia.

•Characteristics :- possess adaptations for climbing trees, as they all descended from tree-dwellers.

•1) a rotating shoulder joint,

• 2) a big toe that is widely separated from the other toes and thumbs, which are widely separated from fingers (except humans), which allow for gripping branches,

•3) stereoscopic vision, two overlapping fields of vision from the eyes, which allows for the perception of depth and gauging distance.

•4)Other characteristics of primates are brains that are larger than those of most other mammals,

•5)claws that have been modified into flattened nails,

•6) only one offspring per pregnancy, and a trend toward holding the body upright.

•Order Primates is divided into two groups:

1. Prosimians include the bush babies of Africa, the lemurs of Madagascar, and the lorises, pottos, and tarsiers of Southeast Asia.

2.Anthropoids include monkeys, apes, and humans.

[Note :- prosimians tend to be nocturnal (in contrast to diurnal anthropoids) and exhibit a smaller size and smaller brain than anthropoids.]

•primates and tool use :-Primates are well known for using tools for hunting or gathering food and water, cover for rain, and self-defence.

•chimpanzees have been using stone tools in the rainforests of Ivory Coast for at least 4300 years. The chimpanzee Stone Age began at least that early, and maybe even earlier. [says Boesch.] Chimpanzees don't use fire, therefore they don't need to know how to do it. To learn how to make fire, they would need to already use it and value fire making skill. Lead researcher Juan Lapuente, from the Comoe Chimpanzee Conservation Project, in Ivory Coast, explained that using similar brush-tipped sticks to dip into bees' nests for honey was common in chimpanzee populations across Africa. "These chimps use especially long brush tips that they make specifically for water - much longer than those used for honey. They are even capable of making spears to hunt other primates for meat, and are known to have developed specialized tool kits for foraging army ants.

•Wild capuchin monkeys use anvils and stone pounding tools.•These were use large, heavy stones to crack hard Panda nuts as well as small stones to break open softer palm oil nuts.

•Orangutans in the wild have developed and passed along a way to make improvised whistles from bundles of leaves, which they use to help ward off predators. This apparently marks the first time an animal has been known to use a tool to help it communicate,.Orangutans repel insects by waving a bough.

• Bonobos may break off parts of trees and drag them noisily in the direction they want others to follow.

•Baboons, members of the old world monkey subfamily, use twigs as tools to pry insects or pebbles from the ground. Bonobos may break off parts of trees and drag them noisily in the direction they want others to follow.

•Gorillas are known to use branches as walking sticks to test water depth and trunks from shrubs as makeshift bridges to cross deep patches of swamp. While other great apes mostly use tools to help get at food, gorillas apparently use them to help them deal with their surroundings in other ways. gorillas use sticks to rake in items; in captivity, they copy humans’ actions such as tickling others with twigs.

•Dolphins are renowned as brainiacs of the seas, and scientists recently discovered they can be tool-using workaholics as well. A group of bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay, Australia, carries marine sponges in their beaks to stir ocean-bottom sand and uncover prey, spending more time hunting with tools than any animal besides humans.

•Sea otters, the largest members of the weasel family, use stones to hammer abalone shells off the rocks and crack the hard shells of prey open, making them the only known tool-using marine mammal for decades, until dolphins came along.

•Elephants are among the most intelligent animals in the world, with brains larger than those of any other land animal. Anecdotes suggest they can intentionally drop logs or rocks on electric fences to short them out and plug up water holes with balls of chewed bark to keep other animals from drinking them away. Asian elephants are even known to systematically modify branches to swat at flies, breaking them down to ideal lengths for attacking the insects.

Gibbons in captivity have hung pieces of rope or blanket on their cages to make swings.

•Early humans in East Africa used hammerstones to strike stone cores and produce sharp flakes. For more than 2 million years, early humans used these tools to cut, pound, crush, and access new foods—including meat from large animals. The stone tools may have been made by Australopithecus afarensis or Kenyanthropus platyops— (a 3.2 to 3.5-million-year-old Pliocene hominin fossil discovered in 1999) the species whose best fossil example is Lucy, which inhabited East Africa at the same time as the date of the oldest stone tools.