Principal Investigator:
Nick P. Toth
Co-Director
CRAFT Stone Age Institute

Co-Investigator:
Kathy D. Schick
Co-Director
CRAFT Stone Age Institute

Co-Investigator:
E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh
Lead Specialist
Great Ape Trust of Iowa

Investigations of Skill Acquisition and Site Formation Processes within Groups of Stone Tool-Making Apes

OVERVIEW

This research will investigate the technological skills and behaviors in modern apes in order to shed light on human evolution and to understand better the development of tool-making and tool-using skills in humans. This research marks an important new stage in a long-term investigation into the stone tool-making and tool-using abilities of apes with the development of a specific focus on two main aspects of their tool-related activities: 1) the acquisition and improvement of stone tool-making skills among different ape individuals and ape species over the course of five years of tool-manufacturing and tool-using; and 2) the dynamics of decision-making in tool-related activities, including transport of stone and the manufacture, transport, and use of tools in different places in the apes’ environments. This research will investigate a diverse group of apes, including bonobos, chimpanzees, and orangutans with differing ages, differing language proficiency, and differing tool-related experience. The research proposed here builds upon the foundation of prior studies, using criteria developed through experimentation for a fine-tuned assessment of stone tool-making skill. It will build on a stone tool-manufacturing tradition already established among the two adults in the bonobo social group at Great Ape Trust of Iowa and ready to be disseminated to two young offspring there. It will expand our understanding of tool-making among apes through experiments with orangutans at Great Ape Trust of Iowa and chimpanzees at Great Ape Research Institute. The methodology employed here is essentially an experimental archaeological approach, in which the apes will make and use stone tools within a social context of ape and human tool-makers. Their artifactual products will be compared and contrasted to the artifactual products made by prehistoric hominids as well as modern humans.

Performance Sites:
» Great Ape Trust of Iowa, Des Moines, Iowa
» Stone Age Institute, Bloomington ( Gosport), IN
» Great Ape Research Institute (GARI), Japan

RELATED PUBLICATIONS
» Culture Prefigures Cognition in Pan/Homo Bonobos
» Cultural Apprenticeship: Social Processes In The Ontogeny of Object Use in Pan paniscus
» Behavioral and Neuroanotomical Asymmetries In Bonobos, Pan paniscus
» Development of Language, Gesture and Play In Bonobos
» Comparative Analysis of Orangutan and Bonobo Numerical Competence
» Basic Memory Processes In Bonobos
» Conversational Vocal Exchanges Among Bonobos
» Multimodal Analysis of Communicative Behavior In Bonobos
» Investigations of Skill Acquisition and Site Formation Processes with Groups of Stone-tool Making Apes
» Music Perception, Learning, and Production In Apes
» Learning and Cognition Same Different Conceptualization and Cross Modal Matching