![]() On several occasions the scientists saw chimpanzees fashion sticks into spears, which they then rammed into tree hollows where little bushbabies were hiding. But it was surprising for a team of primatologists to see chimpanzees in Senegal using tools to hunt. They've been seen making probing sticks for snaring termites, using rocks to bang nuts, and so on. The sight of chimpanzees using tools is hardly new. Today the journal Current Biology publishes yet another piece of the puzzle: female chimpanzees hunting with spears. The oldest wooden spears are 400,000 years old. But hunting tools remained very simple for a long time. By 1.5 million years ago, hominids may have been hunting some of their food while stills scavenging other meals. The oldest stone tools from hominids, dating back 2.6 million years, were likely stone scrapers and other items that were better for scavenging meat than taking down a wildebeest. And in their book Man the Hunted, anthropologists Donna Hart and Robert Sussman argue that for millions of years our hominid ancestors were more likely prey than predator. ![]() Jane Goodall discovered that male chimpanzees hunt monkeys, and since they're our closest living relatives it's possible that our ancestors were hunting millions of years before they could stand upright. The story of hunting is a lot more complicated today, thanks to a lot of new evidence and some critical reappraisal of the old evidence. The ladies were supposed to sit at home raising the wee ones and gather some berries. In the 1976 book The Hunting Hypothesis, Robert Ardrey declared, "Man is man, and not a chimpanzee, because for millions upon millions of evolving years we killed for a living." And remember, it's Man the Hunter. And a bloody-minded psychology helped too. You have to stand tall above the savannah grass, for example, to spot your game. Much of our anatomy, according to the Man-the-Hunter theory, was the result of adaptations for hunting. That's what we made tools for, and that's how we got all the extra energy to fuel our big brains. ![]() Some researchers claimed that the evolution of hunting played a key role in the origin of our lineage. There was a time-in the 1960s and 1970s-when the phrase "Man the Hunter" enjoyed a lot of popularity.
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