Abstract
Stone tool use by wild chimpanzees of West Africa offers a unique opportunity to explore the evolutionary roots of technology during human evolution. However, detailed analyses of chimpanzee stone artifacts are still lacking, thus precluding a comparison with the earliest archaeological record. This paper presents the first systematic study of stone tools used by wild chimpanzees to crack open nuts in Bossou (Guinea-Conakry), and applies pioneering analytical techniques to such artifacts. Automatic morphometric GIS classification enabled to create maps of use wear over the stone tools (anvils, hammers, and hammers/ anvils), which were blind tested with GIS spatial analysis of damage patterns identified visually. Our analysis shows that chimpanzee stone tool use wear can be systematized and specific damage patterns discerned, allowing to discriminate between active and passive pounders in lithic assemblages. In summary, our results demonstrate the heuristic potential of combined suites of GIS techniques for the analysis of battered artifacts, and have enabled creating a referential framework of analysis in which wild chimpanzee battered tools can for the first time be directly compared to the early archaeological record.
Highlights
The use of stone tools to crack open nuts by chimpanzees in West Africa has received considerable attention by primatologists [1,2,3], and the evolutionary implications of this behavior have been widely discussed [4,5,6]
Macroscopically-identified percussive marks were outlined over the images, and indexes such as area, perimeter, and distribution and size of the areas covered by percussion marks (S1 Text), were calculated to produce a spatial pattern of the use wear distribution along the tools. This analysis was based first on a basic morphometric study, in order to characterize the topography of stone tools surfaces
Results of basic morphometric analysis are shown in maps and tables of S1–S4
Summary
The use of stone tools to crack open nuts by chimpanzees in West Africa has received considerable attention by primatologists [1,2,3], and the evolutionary implications of this behavior have been widely discussed [4,5,6]. Parallels between chimpanzee tool use and the archaeological record have been drawn [7,8,9,10,11,12], and in recent years the need for systematic comparisons between the two data sources has been widely recognized [13,14,15,16]. Modern humans that still use stone tools are powerful analogs for understanding the evolution of technological behaviors [17]. There are, recent arguments stating the importance of using Pan troglodytes
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