Captive orangutans figured out how to use rocks as hammers or sharp stones as cutting tools, but even after demonstrations they couldn’t get the hang of making stone tools themselves
living at Kristiansand Zoo and Amusement Park in Norway. The apes were given a box containing a piece of fruit, sealed with rope. They were also given a concrete hammer and a lump of rock. In theory, the orangutans could have used the hammer to knock sharp flakes off the rock, and then used the flakes to cut the rope and reach the fruit. But they didn’t.
The orangutans did hit things with the hammer, though. “We found percussion, which is interesting because orangutans in the wild very rarely interact with stones at all,” says Motes Rodrigo. The orangutans might have been playing, she suggests. In a follow-up experiment, Motes Rodrigo gave the orangutans a flint flake sharpened into an axe-like tool. “One individual, after trying to open the boxes in different ways, did get this sharp stone axe that I had made myself and used it to cut open the box and obtain the reward,” she says. “They can spontaneously, without any training, recognise that a sharp stone can be used for cutting and use it as such.
In line with that, in another experiment Motes Rodrigo gave the orangutans sharp stones, then rewarded them with grapes if they handed them back. This was meant to encourage the orangutans to mentally link sharp stones with rewards. Afterwards, the orangutan who had cut the rope now took a blunt lump of rock and “started banging it around”. This knocked some sharp flakes off it, so in a sense the orangutan had made sharp tools.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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