Chimps Use Cleavers To Chop Food
RichTravsky
Stunning news.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8427000/8427974.stm
For the first time, chimpanzees have been seen using tools to chop up and
reduce food into smaller bite-sized portions.
Chimps in the Nimba Mountains of Guinea, Africa, use both stone and wooden
cleavers, as well as stone anvils, to process Treculia fruits.
The apes are not simply cracking into the Treculia to get to otherwise
unobtainable food, say researchers.
Instead, they are actively chopping up the food into more manageable portions.
Observations of the behaviour are published in the journal Primates.
PhD student Kathelijne Koops and Professor William McGrew of the Leverhulme
Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, University of Cambridge, UK, studied
a group of chimps living wild in the Nimba Mountains.
...
During a monthly survey of chimps (Pan troglodytes) living in the mountain
forests, she came across stone and rocks that had clearly be used by the apes
to process Treculia fruits.
These fruits, which can be the size of a volleyball and weigh up to 8.5kg,
are hard and fibrous.
But despite lacking a hard outer shell, they are too big for a chimpanzee to
get its jaws around and bite into.
So, instead, the chimps use a range of tools to chop them into smaller pieces.
Ms Koops found stone and wooden cleavers, as well as stone anvils used to
fracture the large fruits.
...
jerry warner
RichTravsky wrote:
uhhh not new...
RichTravsky
uhhh yes it is. Cite?
RichTravsky
Here's the abstract
http://www.springerlink.com/content/bv5x25v52903r331/
Do chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) use cleavers and anvils to fracture Treculia
africana fruits? Preliminary data on a new form of percussive technology
Received: 22 July 2009 Accepted: 13 November 2009
Published online: 8 December 2009
Abstract Wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) are renowned for their use of
tools in activities ranging from foraging to social interactions. Different
populations across Africa vary in their tool use repertoires, giving rise to
cultural variation. We report a new type of percussive technology in food
processing by chimpanzees in the Nimba Mountains, Guinea: Treculia fracturing.
Chimpanzees appear to use stone and wooden �cleavers� as tools, as well as
stone outcrop �anvils� as substrate to fracture the large and fibrous fruits
of Treculia africana, a rare but prized food source. This newly described
form of percussive technology is distinctive, as the apparent aim is not to
extract an embedded food item, as is the case in nut cracking, baobab
smashing, or pestle pounding, but rather to reduce a large food item to
manageably sized pieces. Furthermore, these preliminary data provide the
first evidence of chimpanzees using two types of percussive technology for
the same purpose.
This is new.