Archaeological excavation of wild macaque stone tools.
More than 3 million years of excavated archaeological evidence (Harmand et al. 2015) underlies most major insights into the evolution of human behaviour. However, we have seen almost no use of archaeological excavation to similarly broaden our understanding of behaviour in other animal lineages. The few published examples include recovery of a late Holocene assemblage of stones from the Ivory Coast, attributed to the agency of both humans (Homo sapiens) and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) (Mercader et al. 2002, 2007) and exploration of the occupation sites of nontool using species such as penguins (Emslie et al. 2014) and other birds (Burnham et al. 2009) The development of viable methods for identifying and interpreting past non human tool use landscapes is essential if we are to gain a better understanding of technological evolution within other animals, including our close relatives, the primates. Recently, the growth of primate archaeology has built on the close phylogenetic relationship between humans and other primates to begin filling in this lacuna (Haslam et al. 2009; Carvalho, 2011; Stewart et al. 2011; Haslam, 2012, 2014; Visalberghi et al. 2013; Haslam et al. 2014; McGrew et al. 2014; Benito Calvo et al. 2015; Luncz et al. 2015; Kuhl et al. 2016) Here, we present the first report on an archaeologically excavated Old World monkey tool use site, which was created by wild Burmese long tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis aurea) (Bunlungsup et al. 2016) during shellfish processing activities in coastal Thailand. These macaques use stone and shell pounding
Journal of human evolution