When monkeys use stones to crack open nuts, they generate sharp flakes of rock — exactly like the ones archaeologists long thought were tools made by early humans.
If archaeologists like him came across these tools in an excavation from a million years ago, he says,"we would have diagnosed this as, 'Oh, they are making flakes to cut up things.' But they're not."
He and his colleagues have analyzed over a thousand stone pieces associated with the monkeys, which they call"the most extensive dataset of nonhuman primate percussive flakes and flaked stones to date." There are ways to distinguish stone tools specifically made for cutting, like the presence of animal bones with cut marks, or additional modifications to make the tools more fancy, or evidence that stone was imported from another location specifically for the purpose of making tools.
Nonetheless, Braun says a person could throw"quite a number" of macaque-produced flakes into an excavation of early human artifacts and no one would notice.But he thinks archaeologists now have to seriously consider that some or even a lot of the sharp flakes they see at human sites could have been made unintentionally.
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