A tiny blanket octopus, floating in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, holds venomous jellyfish tendrils along its arms for protection. A macaque o

Tools of the Wild: Unveiling the Crafty Side of Nature

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2024-02-10 11:30:05

A tiny blanket octopus, floating in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, holds venomous jellyfish tendrils along its arms for protection. A macaque on a Thai beach smashes shellfish open with a stone. Searching for a mate, a cricket in southern India carefully carves a hole in a leaf to amplify his love song.

Archaeologists have long considered tool use to be an evolutionary milestone that distinguished our lineage from other animals. Humans were considered the technological species.

But since the mid-20th century, hundreds of nonhuman species have been found busily making use of myriad natural materials. There are orangutans that pry seeds with sticks, elephants that swat flies with trunk-held twigs, bees that place dung to ward off predatory wasps, archerfish that turn water itself into a spear, and many more.

As archaeologists, we have worked for decades studying tools made by human ancestors and relatives, as well as wild tool-using animals such as monkeys, sea otters, and crows. Confronted by the expanding diversity of tool users, researchers have reached a tipping point: It’s time to rethink the meaning of tool use—and what it implies about the intelligence of humans, nonhuman animals, and our evolutionary ancestors.