There are many nutcrackers in the animal kingdom, and their skills also vary from animal to animal. Some chimpanzees appear to be more efficient at using tools to crack nuts than others in the group. This efficiency may also be an evolutionary advantage, as these primates need to expend less energy and obtain more food in return to perform nutcracking more effectively. For more information on the survey results, please visit The study was published in the journal Nature Human Behavior on December 23..
A 2012 video showing individual differences in nut-cracking efficiency among Bossou chimpanzees. The first cracker was Peely, a 14-year-old adult male who successfully cracked two oil palm fruits. The second cracker is Jeje, a 15-year-old adult male who fails to crack a single nut. The third cracker is Foff, a 32-year-old adult man who successfully cracks an oil palm fruit. Peley’s footage comes a few minutes before Jeje and Foaf’s footage. Credit: Sophie Verdugo and Tetsuro Matsuzawa.
chimpanzees have The use of various stone tools has been observed since ancient times. Biologists and anthropologists consider tool usage an important indicator of brain and cognitive development in animal species. Old One Technology – 3 certain stone tools it goes back Approximately 2.9 million years ago Unearthed in what is now Kenya, it is thought to be the earliest example of human use of stone tools.
“We hope to access this incredible treasure trove of videos of our closest living relatives using stone tools known to be similar to our Oldowan technology. is completed.” Sophie Verdugosays study co-author and evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Oxford in the UK. popular science. “I’m personally interested in social and cultural learning, and I wanted to know whether changes in learning experiences have a measurable impact on adult behavior.”
in new researchVerdugo and colleagues analyzed more than 3,882 footage of 21 wild chimpanzees cracking nuts in Bossou between 1992 and 2017. measure of efficiency It was used to determine whether some individual chimpanzees are more efficient than others. These include the time it took for the chimpanzee to crack the nut (bout duration), the number of blows per nut, the success rate, the number of times the blows moved the nut (displacement rate), and the number of times the chimpanzee replaced the nut. It will be. Tools (tool switching speed).
they found Consistent individual-level differences in efficiency Applies to all measures except tool change rate. For example, some chimpanzees took twice as long to reach hidden, nutritious legumes as other chimpanzees of the same age and sex. Four measures of efficiency also improved as the chimpanzees got older, until age 11. However, biological sex did not appear to play a role in nutcrackers.
“It was really surprising that we didn’t find a difference in efficiency between male and female chimpanzees, because the female bias in tool-use efficiency was more pronounced in chimpanzees and bonobos (both our closest living relatives). “This is because they were previously discovered in humans (relatives of humans),” Verdugo said. “Maybe Bossou chimpanzees are just a strange community bucking this trend.”
Verdugo believes this lack of gender differences may be because their study examined tool use over a very long period of time. All previous studies that looked at the female bias used short-term data, just a few years.
“This really shows the importance of long-term research in long-lived species like chimpanzees,” Verdugo said.
There is some evidence to suggest that there are differences in tool use among some species. Burmese long-tailed gibbon cracking an oyster. However, these types of studies typically rely on data collected over a short period of time, rather than over 20 years, as in this study.
[ Related: Great apes may have cognitive foundations for language. ]
These findings suggest that some chimpanzees may have better cognitive or motor abilities than other chimpanzees within their group. Additional longitudinal studies are needed to understand the causes and consequences of this variation. Understanding these differences in the use of tools The interdisciplinary field of primate archeologyinvestigates the evolutionary role that tools have played in humans and non-human primates. Boss chimpanzees use stone tools in a way that scientists believe early humans used stone tools, so this chimpanzee community has some connections to humans.
“Primate archeology is now a well-established field of research,” Verdugo explains. “Identifying how some individuals may currently contribute more to critical records than others, or which tools are used by individuals with particular skills (or lack of skills) There is a growing recognition that it can be simple.
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