Is primate tool use special? Chimpanzee and New Caledonian crow compared

100

The complexity of Stone Age tool-making is assumed to have relied upon cultural transmission, but direct evidence is lacking. This paper reviews evidence bearing on this question provided through five related empirical perspectives. Controlled experimental studies offer special power in identifying and dissecting social learning into its diverse component forms, such as imitation and emulation. The first approach focuses on experimental studies that have discriminated social learning processes in nut-cracking by chimpanzees. Second come experiments that have identified and dissected the processes of cultural transmission involved in a variety of other force-based forms of chimpanzee tool use. A third perspective is provided by field studies that have revealed a range of forms of forceful, targeted tool use by chimpanzees, that set percussion in its broader cognitive context. Fourth are experimental studies of the development of flint knapping to make functional sharp flakes by bonobos, implicating and defining the social learning and innovation involved. Finally, new and substantial experiments compare what different social learning processes, from observational learning to teaching, afford good quality human flake and biface manufacture. Together these complementary approaches begin to delineate the social learning processes necessary to percussive technologies within the Pan – Homo clade.

Section: (B) Panbanishamentioning

confidence: 99%

Experimental studies illuminate the cultural transmission of percussive technologies inHomoandPan

Whiten¹

2015

100

“…These categories were intended to allow a degree of standardization across different specific tool-use behaviours exhibited by specific animals, and they help to provide a firmer basis for cross-taxon comparisons by grouping together tool-use actions that share general manipulative or combinatorial features. For example, elsewhere in this themed issue, McGrew [14] compares chimpanzee and corvid tool use via these categories, although his approach differs slightly as he considers only habitual or customary tool use.…”

Section: 'Captivity Bias' In Animal Tool Use (A) Animal Tool Use In Cmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Captivity bias’ in animal tool use and its implications for the evolution of hominin technology

Haslam

2013

Animals in captive or laboratory settings may outperform wild animals of the same species in both frequency and diversity of tool use, a phenomenon here termed ‘captivity bias’. Although speculative at this stage, a logical conclusion from this concept is that animals whose tool-use behaviour is observed solely under natural conditions may be judged cognitively or physically inferior than if they had also been tested or observed under controlled captive conditions. In turn, this situation creates a potential problem for studies of the behaviour of extinct members of the human family tree—the hominins—as hominin cognitive abilities are often judged on material evidence of tool-use behaviour left in the archaeological record. In this review, potential factors contributing to captivity bias in primates (including increased contact between individuals engaged in tool use, guidance or shaping of tool-use behaviour by other tool-users and increased free time and energy) are identified and assessed for their possible effects on the behaviour of the Late Pleistocene hominin Homo floresiensis . The captivity bias concept provides one way to uncouple hominin tool use from cognition, by considering hominins as subject to the same adaptive influences as other tool-using animals.

“…The discovery of not only use, but also manufacture, of tools by a variety of non-human animal species overturned this view (see [3] for a recent and thorough review, and [4]). However, the process of making tools-particularly novel toolsremains somewhat mysterious in both humans and non-humans.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The development of tool manufacture in humans: what helps young children make innovative tools?

Chappell

Cutting

Apperly

et al. 2013

We know that even young children are proficient tool users, but until recently, little was known about how they make tools. Here, we will explore the concepts underlying tool making, and the kinds of information and putative cognitive abilities required for children to manufacture novel tools. We will review the evidence for novel tool manufacture from the comparative literature and present a growing body of data from children suggesting that innovation of the solution to a problem by making a tool is a much more challenging task than previously thought. Children's difficulty with these kinds of tasks does not seem to be explained by perseveration with unmodified tools, difficulty with switching to alternative strategies, task pragmatics or issues with permission. Rather, making novel tools (without having seen an example of the required tool within the context of the task) appears to be hard, because it is an example of an ‘ill-structured problem’. In this type of ill-structured problem, the starting conditions and end goal are known, but the transformations and/or actions required to get from one to the other are not specified. We will discuss the implications of these findings for understanding the development of problem-solving in humans and other animals.