It takes years of practice to place one of the hardest nuts in the world on a level surface, find a good-sized hammer stone, and hit the nut with the right speed while keeping one’s fingers out of the way. Human novices have trouble cracking the same tough nuts, partly because they do not have the same muscle strength as an adult chimpanzee, but also because they lack the required coordination. The chimpanzees jab their “spears” into a tree cavity to kill a sleeping bush baby, a small primate that serves as a protein source for female apes unable to run down monkeys the way males do.23 It is also well known that chimpanzee communities in West Africa crack nuts with stones, a behavior unheard of in East African communities. This came as a shock, since hunting weapons were thought to be another uniquely human advance. One savanna community, for example, uses pointed sticks to hunt. De Waal believes that some species use forms of intelligence that we are still unaware of intelligence beyond our imagination. “Chimpanzees use between fifteen and twenty-five different tools per community, and the precise tools vary with cultural and ecological circumstances. Humans are extremely proud of our complex language and abstract thought, but these are just two tools in a big box of mental functions used by animals.
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