These animals created 50,000-year-old monkey stone tools that were found in Pedra Furada, located in the state of Piau in North-Eastern Brazil.
Pedra Furada is a group of approximately 800 archaeological sites where thousands of rock paintings from 12,000 years ago, coupled with charcoal from extremely old fires, and stone shards that may have formerly been tools and have been dated to as far back as 50,000 years ago, have all been found.
Prior to the advent of the Clovis people in North America, the tools were first thought to have been manufactured by prehistoric humans, but a recent study published in the journal The Holocene indicates that capuchin monkeys actually made the tools.
The subfamily Cebinae of New World monkeys, or capuchin monkeys, inhabits the tropical jungles of Central and South America as well as northern Argentina.
Researchers have frequently recorded capuchin monkeys utilizing river stones to crack open palm nuts on massive flat structures, making them the most intelligent New World primate.
The stone tools from Pedra Furada and other Pleistocene archaeological sites in Brazil, such as Sitio do Meio, Vale da Pedra Furada, and Toca da Tira Peia, were compared with modern capuchin-made stone tool deposits by archaeologist Agustn Agnoln of the National Institute of Anthropology and Latin American Thought (INAPL) and CONICET and palaeontologist Federico Agnoln of the Azara Foundation
The scientists discovered that the tools from Pleistocene sites like Pedra Furada are consistent with capuchin lithic deposits, which were produced by repetitive strikes between a boulder and a flat quartzite surface.
“We are certain that the early archaeological sites from Brazil may not be human-derived, but rather may belong to capuchin monkeys,” the researchers concluded.
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