While I’m busy messing around with all the new features on my blog, a new scientific discipline is being created: Primate archaeology.
This will focus on the use of tools and its history not just in humans but in all primate species.
We now know that we’re not the only animals who use tools. So it’s a bit unfair to assume that every time we discover a tool, it was a human that invented it. Or a space alien.
“It’s not clear whether we hominins invented this kind of stone technology, or whether both humans and the great apes inherited it from a common forebear . . . We used to think that culture and, above anything else, technology was the exclusive domain of humans, but this is not the case. We need comparable methods of data collection among researchers dealing with 2 million year old hominin sites and modern primatological assemblages.”
I’m still waiting for Space Alien God Primate Archaeology but they probably already invented that. In the seventies, I’m guessing.
