20th Century FoxDo not panic, but the plan for monkey global domination has been well under way for centuries.
OK that is obviously a massive exaggeration, but Brazilian capuchin monkeys have officially entered the stone age.
According to Oxford University researchers the South American primates have been using stones to crack open cashew nuts for 700 years.
Dr Michael Haslam, a primate arachaeologist of Oxford University, said:
Until now, the only archaeological record of pre-modern, non-human animal tool use comes from a study of three chimpanzee sites in Cote d’Ivoire in Africa, where tools were dated to between 4,300 and 1,300 years old.
Here, we have new evidence that suggests monkeys and other primates out of Africa were also using tools for hundreds, possibly thousands of years. This is an exciting, unexplored area of scientific study that may even tell us about the possible influence of monkeys’ tool use on human behaviour.
For example, cashew nuts are native to this area of Brazil, and it is possible that the first humans to arrive here learned about this unknown food through watching the monkeys and their primate cashew-processing industry.
Humans can breath a sigh of relief though as the technology seems to have plateaued at stone, whereas Homo sapiens upgraded technology far quicker.
So they are smart but, for now at least, unorganised…
