16
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: not found

      On the tool use behavior of the bonobo-chimpanzee last common ancestor, and the origins of hominine stone tool use.

      1
      American journal of primatology
      Wiley-Blackwell
      Pan paniscus, Pan troglodytes, demography, genetics, primate archaeology

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisherPubMed
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          The last common ancestor (LCA) shared by chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (P. paniscus) was an Early Pleistocene African ape, which, based on the behavior of modern chimpanzees, may be assumed to be a tool-using animal. However, the character of tool use in the Pan lineage prior to the 20th century is largely unknown. Here, I use available data on wild bonobo tool use and emerging molecular estimates of demography during Pan evolution to hypothesise the plausible tool use behavior of the bonobo-chimpanzee LCA (or "Pancestor") at the start of the Pleistocene, over 2 million years ago. This method indicates that the common ancestor of living Pan apes likely used plant tools for probing, sponging, and display, but it did not use stone tools. Instead, stone tool use appears to have been independently invented by Western African chimpanzees (P. t. verus) during the Middle Pleistocene in the region of modern Liberia-Ivory Coast-Guinea, possibly as recently as 200,000-150,000 years ago. If this is the case, then the LCA of humans and chimpanzees likely also did not use stone tools, and this trait probably first emerged among hominins in Pliocene East Africa. This review also suggests that the consistently higher population sizes of Central African chimpanzees (P. t. troglodytes) over the past million years may have contributed to the increased complexity of wild tool use seen in this sub-species today.

          Related collections

          Author and article information

          Journal
          Am. J. Primatol.
          American journal of primatology
          Wiley-Blackwell
          1098-2345
          0275-2565
          Oct 2014
          : 76
          : 10
          Affiliations
          [1 ] Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
          Article
          10.1002/ajp.22284
          24710771
          ae480c62-3390-438d-a2e8-e4cee2c093b7
          History

          Pan troglodytes,demography,genetics,primate archaeology,Pan paniscus

          Comments

          Comment on this article