Culture & Ethics Icon Culture & Ethics
Neuroscience & Mind Icon Neuroscience & Mind
Paleontology Icon Paleontology

Science Writing Tries to Smash Human Exceptionalism

Photo credit: garethwiscombe, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons.

At BBC’s ScienceFocus, science writer Claire Asher observes,

The Stone Age might conjure up images of early humans, sitting around a campfire or hunting prehistoric beasts, but evidence shows that we’re not the only species that has learned how to work with stone tools. 

“The 50,000 year old mystery of stone tools: Were they made by monkeys?”, January 23, 2025

That’s true. As she goes on to explain, apes and monkeys, otters and crows use stones to smash things. For that matter, polar bears use stones to kill walruses. Vultures use them to crack ostrich eggs. But what do those adaptations have to do with a Stone Age?

First Off, What Is a Stone Age?

Recently, I had a chance to visit a traveling exhibit on Stonehenge offered at the Royal BC Museum.

Stonehenge, a New Stone Age (Neolithic) ceremonial center and burial place near what is now Salisbury in southern England, was built between 3000 and 1520 BCE — though the site was used for ceremonial purposes beginning about 8000–7000 BCE (Britannica).

At the Museum’s magazine, Amanda Richardson offers, “The theories that surround the creation of Stonehenge are as elusive and magical as the stone circle itself. Aliens, giants, or the wizened old sorcerer Merlin?”

Decades of research have now given us a fairly good idea how the unknown (human) builders quarried and transported the immense stones. But, as she says, the results are still awesome: “For every question science has answered there are as many that remain just out of reach.”

And — this is the remarkable part — it was all done with stone. There were no metal tools available, just harder stones.

Stonehenge culture, remarkable as it was, started to fall apart during the Bronze Age, when new peoples equipped with metal tools and weapons entered the area. When the Age of Stone meets the Age of Bronze, there can only be one outcome.

But, while it lasted, that was a Stone Age. Notice though the way in which, in the Science Focus article, the claims for animals using stones to break things are subtly equated with human endeavors.

Subtle Equations

The article offers a number of similar instances, worth noting for what is assumed and what is omitted. For example,

Evidence from Côte d’Ivoire in Africa shows that chimpanzees have been using this technique for more than 4,000 years. This suggests that stone tool use might be a trait that both humans and chimpanzees inherited from their last common ancestor. Although, it’s also possible that both species learned this skill independently of each other. 

“By monkeys?”

For all we know, chimpanzees, along with many other life forms, have been smashing things with stones for hundreds of thousands of years. The practice could well be tens of millions of years old. There is no reason to use dating systems like “more than 4,000 years” here unless the intention is to imply equivalence to a human civilization.

Using stone tools was once thought to be unique to Homo sapiens, but archaeologists have discovered stone artefacts from earlier hominin species, such as Homo habilis.

“By monkeys?”

Well, if scientists were once unaware of the many animal life forms that use stones to smash things, it’s surely common knowledge now. So what’s the point of bringing up habilis here if not to stress that there were lots of not-quite-humans out there in the past? At least, in the context, that’s how it comes off.

Similarly,

Nevertheless, manufacturing stone tools remains a cornerstone of human evolution, and archaeologists have used stone-tool artefacts to piece together the behaviour and movements of ancient humans. So the discovery that other primates also use stone tools has called some of the oldest archaeological sites into question.

In 2022, archaeologists in Argentina concluded that 50,000-year-old stone tools in Brazil may have been created by capuchin monkeys, not humans. The quartz tools look remarkably similar to tools crafted by present-day capuchins.

If these ancient tools were indeed left behind by monkeys, it would extend the record of their stone-tool use by thousands of years and cast doubt on the timing of Homo sapiens’ arrival in South America.

“By monkeys?”

That’s one way of looking at the story. Another way is to see that advocates of human habitation in Brazil dating to 50,000 years ago were probably overinterpreting the evidence. For evidence of explicitly human habitation, we should look for clearly human culture.

In an article on the Brazilian tools question at Mind Matters News, we offered an example of that kind of evidence:

Another current dispute, for example, turns on whether the dots that accompany many Ice Age paintings from 20,000 years ago are evidence of a lunar calendar. It’s quite likely that the series of dots and symbols represent some form of record-keeping or communication. There may or may not be a lunar calendar in the mix but there is no possibility that these artworks were created by monkeys. We know that we are in a human world here. We just aren’t sure what its inhabitants were trying to say. 

“Study: Monkeys, Not Humans, Likely Made Ancient Brazilian Tools,” January 10, 2023

We have very little information about humans from remote antiquity so we should proceed with caution. But it is worth drawing attention to the way that much science writing works, perhaps unintentionally, to imply an equivalence between animal behavior and the human mind. But the equivalence is a feature of contemporary science beliefs, not of evidence.

Cross-posted at Mind Matters News.