https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/archaeology-tool-user-intelligence/ New Stories All Stories Podcast Seasons Episodes op-ed / Material World Tools of the Wild: Unveiling the Crafty Side of Nature Michael Haslam and Abigail Desmond Once considered a uniquely human activity, tool use has been spotted across diverse species. It's time to rethink what tools reveal about their users' intelligence and evolution. essay / Decoded Taking Cultural Preservation to a New Dimension Stephen Wessels, Benjamin Schoville, Jayne Wilkins, and Sechaba Maape A multidisciplinary team of researchers explains historical, cultural, and ethical issues they considered while developing a 3D scan of a South African site to be shared with the world online. poem / Reflections A Mausoleum of Our Everydays/Nai nsang negu herouki Haidamteu Zeme Newme A humanities and social science doctoral student from Manipur, India, takes readers on a journey through ordinary moments interwoven with violence. essay / Lab Bench Celebrity Status Almost Ruined Ancient DNA Research Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias An evolutionary anthropologist draws lessons from paleogenetic's journey from Jurassic Park fiction to Nobel Prize reality. poem / Wayfinding Strange Future Ojo Taiye A Nigerian eco-activist and poet wonders what future lies ahead in the face of climate change impacts and resistance to large-scale emission reductions. essay / Expressions Poems of Witness and Possibility: Inside Zones of Conflict Christine Weeber, Ather Zia, and Toiba Naseema Anthropological poems from around the globe speak to people's creative will, resistance, and resilience--and the significance of our shared humanity. op-ed / Maladies Gene Therapy's Promise Meets Nigeria's Sickle Cell Reality Morenike Samuel Breakthrough treatments can now cure sickle cell anemia in the U.S. But the pricey therapies will hardly help in Nigeria, where social changes could do more for millions impacted by the disease. essay / Phenomenon Taking on Parkinson's Disease--With Boxing Gloves and Punching Bags Julia K. Sloane In a California gym, people living with Parkinson's practice noncontact boxing to redefine their experience of the disease and maintain a sense of self. op-ed / Crossroads Como desaparecen objetos de los museos Jeannette Plummer Sires Tras los presuntos robos en el Museo Britanico, una conservadora de museos explica los desafios de llevar el registro de las colecciones --y las limitaciones legales para devolver material cultural a las comunidades de origen--. poem / Reflections Earlier I Had Nightmares, Now I Have Insomnia Toiba Naseema A Kashmiri poet-anthropologist records the restless despair many feel under Indian occupation. essay / In Flux Tackling the Wreckage of War Jonathan Gardner An archaeologist traces how rubble from World War II bombings helped turn London marshlands into a footballing utopia. interview / Viewpoint How Racism Shapes the U.S. Opioid Epidemic Marlaina Martin Public health officials say opioid use and related deaths have reached a crisis point in the U.S. An interview with anthropologist and psychiatrist Helena Hansen unpacks the racial disparities in how drug addiction is interpreted, portrayed, and treated. poem / Reflections A Long Road Ahead Toiba Naseema SAPIENS' 2023 poet-in-residence questions where peace of mind can come from for Indian-occupied Kashmir. op-ed / Human Nature What Is "Natural" for Human Sexual Relationships? Rui Diogo A biological and anthropological researcher explains how humans' diverse ways of mating might have evolved. essay / Counterpoint Dismantling the "Man the Hunter" Myth Sarah A. Lacy and Cara Ocobock Two biological anthropologists analyze archaeological and physiological evidence to debunk enduring assumptions about the gendered division of labor in ancient times. poem / Human Rights This Militarization Toiba Naseema A poet-anthropologist conveys her life when she was coming of age under the increasing mobilization of military forces in Indian-occupied Kashmir. poem / Counterpoint Documenting the Kashmir Conflict Through Poetry Toiba Naseema SAPIENS' 2023 poet-in-residence sketches the history she speaks to in three poems from Indian-occupied Kashmir. essay / Material World Why Shoes Do Not Make the Runner Hannah Borenstein East African runners wearing "super shoes" have outpaced global marathon records. But the shoe fervor--alongside older stereotypes about African runners' "natural" abilities--means athletes' hard work often gets sidelined. essay / Kinship Being LGBTQ+ in U.S. Protestant Churches Benjamin Hollenbach As homophobic and transphobic rhetoric sweeps the U.S., some churches are increasingly welcoming LGBTQ+ parishioners who participate in religious life and help reconcile Christianity with a spectrum of sexual and gender identities. essay / Ask SAPIENS Anthropologists on Palestine Amid the war on Gaza and long before, anthropologists have been speaking out against Israel's occupation of Palestine. Here's a curated list of their perspectives as scholars and activists. essay / Letters Best of SAPIENS 2023 In another year of exceptional challenges and hardships, anthropologists tackled a range of issues and questions about what it means to be human. Here are some of SAPIENS' best from this year. op-ed / Crossroads How Museum Items Go Missing Jeannette Plummer Sires After alleged thefts from the British Museum, a curator explains the challenges of keeping track of collections--and the legal limitations on returning cultural material to source communities. essay / Crossroads Treasure Hunters Pose Problems for Archaeologists Hipolito Sanchiz Alvarez de Toledo and Hipolito Sanchiz Alcaraz Two scholars discuss the challenges of accurately studying underwater archaeological heritage--among them, unauthorized acquisitions. photo-essay / Expressions The Vibrant Worlds of Batuan Paintings in Bali Annie Tucker and Robert Lemelson A new multimedia project connects the development of a Balinese regional painting style with anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, who began commissioning art in the region in the 1930s. essay / Decoded Ancient Pollen Is Hiding in a Surprising Place Lynne Quick A paleoecologist explains what pollen in fossilized mammal urine can reveal about past ecosystems and environmental change. essay / In Flux Dismantling the Walls in Our Heads Kerstin Lange The Berlin Wall fell more than three decades ago--but political, social, and economic divides between East and West Germany continue to reverberate, even among those born after Reunification. essay / Field Notes Spend a Day Tracking Chimpanzees Kirsty Graham A series of short videos captures a rare view into the lives of wild chimps through the eyes of a researcher. column / Curiosities In Defense of Museums Stephen E. Nash In response to news of ethical violations by museums, a curator reflects on the past and future missions of such institutions. essay / Wayfinding Restoring Faces and Dignity to Skeletal Remains Victoria Gibbon An anthropologist explains how a South African university used community-driven research to honor human remains acquired unethically. essay / Phenomenon Las entranas de la videovigilancia en la Ciudad de Mexico Esteban Salmon Un antropologo investiga como la rapida expansion del sistema de videovigilancia en una ciudad esta transformando la investigacion criminal, a veces de formas profundamente enganosas. op-ed / Viewpoint I Was Penalized for Learning a Language at Home Veronica Valencia Gonzalez A researcher explains why the Fulbright-Hays fellowship should change its rules that have kept native and heritage speakers from working where their languages are spoken. poem / Reflections To Wear the Wind Beni Sumer Yanthan A tribal scholar from the state of Nagaland in India engages with the loss of traditional cultural practices and locates the creation of a new world order where the "natural" is increasingly isolated from the "human." 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It's time to rethink what tools reveal about their users' intelligence and evolution. By Michael Haslam and Abigail Desmond 7 Feb 2024 Perched on dirt ground beside fallen leaves and a log, a tan and black monkey raises a beige stone in its right hand while looking down at a small black object placed on a rock in front of it. A bearded capuchin monkey cracks a seed with a stone tool in Serra da Capivara, Brazil. Tiago Falotico/Wikimedia Commons 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. Like you--and the device you're reading this on--these creatures are using tools. 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. Given we now know tool use appears across many different species, do humans still deserve bragging rights? 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. Author Michael Haslam discusses archaeological evidence that a capuchin group has used stone tools for at least 700 years. YouTube/University of Oxford WILD TOOL USE Tools aren't part of our body, but they allow us to act on the world in new ways. Humanity's relationship with them is complicated, long-term, and committed. The archaeological record tells us that more than 3 million years ago, human ancestors began breaking rocks into handy implements. Since then, tool-related physical traits such as flexible hands and shoulders have been evolutionarily hard-baked into our bones. It is now clear that many aspects of human tool use are echoed throughout the animal world. Like our hand adaptations, sponge crabs have also evolved appendages optimized for tool use. Their back legs point upward on mobile joints, with spines and hooks that allow them to clasp objects such as shells, rocks, and algae as a defensive camouflage or decoration. We humans recognize that we need a tool, find the materials to make one, and then use it to gain some benefit. So do some Aphaenogaster ants: Upon finding liquid food on the forest floor, they search for suitable material--usually a piece of leaf or soil--to soak up the liquid and transport it home. If the right size tool is not found, they make one on the spot from larger pieces. One of the most influential steps taken by hominins--our ancestors since we split from chimpanzees and bonobos about 7 million years ago--was to start breaking apart stones, leaving sharp edges. Turns out, wild bearded capuchin monkeys in Brazil do this too. Meanwhile, unbroken stone tools are used by some sea otters, Egyptian vultures, digger wasps, corolla spiders, and more. What of shoes and oven mitts, sunscreen and underpants? Another trait we share with various critters is using tools to help insulate ourselves from bodily harm. Dolphins off Western Australia protect themselves by holding tough sea sponges over their beak (or rostrum) as they forage in the sandy seafloor. To avoid strong sunlight or damaging waves, many species of sea urchins cover themselves with rocks, debris, and even human rubbish. As her pup floats nearby, a mother sea otter uses a stone anvil on her chest to open a scrumptious mussel. Michael Haslam From this sprawling menagerie, one thing is clear: Tool use does not unambiguously identify human-like mental processes. There appears to be no need for a large brain or any other special mark of complex cognition or physical ability. The tool user may or may not consciously think about what it is doing, understand what will happen next, or intend any outcomes. In our view, any thoughts or motivations for tool use need to be explored instead of assumed. Human standards may not be the best starting point for those explorations. What a spider wants, what an orca holds, or what an octopus plans can be quite alien to our everyday experience. We need to meet other animals on their own terms. REDEFINING TOOL USE A helpful notion of tool use should work at all scales: from a solitary woodpecker finch probing insects with a cactus spine to a chimpanzee community sharing technologies across generations, from the sharp rock of a hominin ancestor to the Saturn V rocket. At its heart, tool use requires individuals, objects, and some kind of physical interaction between them. The tool allows its user to extend or alter their natural abilities. The key is that the object enables novel actions, giving us a starting point for a definition: Tools are enabling objects. More specifically, we can say that tool use is the attentional use of enabling objects. The animal must sense that it is using the tool. Researchers can detect a creature's attention by watching what it does. Where animals repeatedly look, reach, or echolocate--what they fly or swim or slither toward--provides clues about their attention. For those animals that are no longer around, archaeology offers ways to reconstruct attention. This can include identifying damage from use and inventorying diverse objects found gathered in one place. What of the objects themselves? Are there any special requirements that make them a tool? In Indonesia, a sponge crab uses its well-adapted back legs to carry a sponge. Bernard DUPONT/Wikimedia Commons Material is immaterial. The objects can be anything--sand grains, grass stems, soap bubbles, you name it. If a critter can perceive and manipulate the item, it's fair game. But we do believe there is one limitation: Tools must be portable. With a watering can, you can dampen any garden in the world. With a hose attached to your house, not so much. The obvious drawback for fixed objects, even flexible ones like a hose or a hanging vine, is that your reach is extremely limited. From this come other limits on how you can combine one object with another or share. Portable tools can be passed around and passed on. [1] [1] We know that many animals do use attached things in ways that superficially resemble tool use. For example, shrike birds cache prey on cactuses, wrasse fish pound open shellfish by hitting them on hard corals, and cows rub themselves on fence posts to scratch those bits that hooves don't reach. These are important actions for those animals, and they deserve to be studied in their own right, not as "borderline" or "proto" or sort-of tools. We've decided to call them "fixels." Whether an immovable anvil or a good scratching tree, fixels are their own category, involving distinct strategies from the animals that use them and appropriate attention when scientists investigate them. TOOLS AND SMARTS Under this new definition, tool use is decoupled from intelligence, intention, and human-like cognitive processes; tool use instead describes an action--a behavior that can be observed. Human tool use has long served as the de facto standard to assess other animals' capabilities. Anthropologists have asked: Which animals do things like humans--and therefore must be clever like our kind? What can these other species tell us about ourselves and our ancestors? We think it's time to flip the script. Instead, researchers should ask what tool use reveals about how animals view their worlds. What is important to those creatures, and how do they get things done? Scientists should also avoid lumping an entire species together when talking about "tool users." As far as researchers have observed, most individual chimps do not use stone tools. And most dolphins, monkeys, octopuses, and crows seem to forgo tools entirely. Instead, this behavior, like many others, is often related to factors such as sex, age or stage-of-life, social role, or individual personality--even in those leaf-sponging ants. For most animals, we know little about the pressures that prompt them to select, modify, and team up with pieces of their world. A new Caledonian crow holds a stick tool that it made. Michael Haslam A sea urchin covers itself with shells and a rock. James St. John, CC BY 2.0/Wikimedia Commons Features critical to animals' success sometimes evolve independently in distantly related lineages--a fascinating process called "convergent evolution." Most bats, birds, and bees can all fly, for example. And the eyes of humans and squids evolved separately from one another. As with physical traits, the independent evolution of similar behaviors can tell us a lot about what was beneficial in an animal's evolutionary environment--be it social, physical, sexual, or otherwise. What can animals that use tools tell us about how they succeed in their world? How does human-like tool use fit into the behavioral kaleidoscope of evolutionary success? We break from the long-held notion that tool use distinguishes humans (or human-like intelligences) from the rest of the animal kingdom. But our thinking is not without precedent. Distantly related animals in vastly different environments are often grouped in commonsense categories. Animals that burrow or nest, animals that perform courtship displays, animals that cache food, animals that live in colonies, animals that fly--all these categories include representatives from diverse branches of the evolutionary tree. "Animals that use tools" is a useful addition to these descriptive, observable categories. Viewed this way, tool use ceases to be a museum tray of curious behaviors through which we occasionally rummage, trying to find miniature or off-kilter versions of ourselves. Instead, we see a wonderfully diverse group whose true ingenuity will only shine once we learn to share the spotlight. Michael Haslam Michael Haslam is an archaeologist who studies the evolution of tool use in human and nonhuman animals. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Queensland and works at the World Heritage Neolithic site of Skara Brae, Orkney. His academic work includes stone tool function, the migration of modern humans out of Africa, and field studies with tool-using monkeys, sea otters, chimpanzees, crows, and starlings. Haslam previously led the Primate Archaeology project at Oxford University, funded by the European Research Council. He writes about animal tool use at the Twig Technology blog. Follow him on Bluesky @twigtechnology.bsky.social. Open Bio Close Bio Abigail Desmond Abigail Desmond is a lecturer in human evolutionary biology at Harvard University, where she teaches courses on technology, human evolution, and human cognition, among others. She is a Paleolithic archaeologist and received her D.Phil. and M.Phil. degrees from the University of Oxford. Desmond's research focuses on the intersection of technology, biology, and cognition, particularly in the human lineage. Open Bio Close Bio Copy link Facebook Twitter Email Print Republish Share [ ] Subscribe to Our Newsletter [ ] Subscribe Stay connected Find us on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Twitter, Mastodon, Flipboard Share Copy link, Facebook, Twitter, Email, Print, Republish Suggestions for You essay / Reflections How Apes Reveal Human History Mary Shirley Mitchell Great apes provide a window into the story of human evolution--and that's one more reason to protect them. op-ed / Counterpoint The Problems of Evolution as a "March of Progress" Alexander Werth The idea that evolution is a hierarchy of complexity with humans on top lurks in everything from biology classes to politics. It's time to unlearn this false and harmful view. op-ed / Human Nature How Human Are We? 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