First GIS Analysis of Modern Stone Tools Used by Wild Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) in Bossou, Guinea, West Africa

Alfonso Benito-Calvo, Susana Carvalho, Adrian Arroyo, Tetsuro Matsuzawa and Ignacio de la Torre

PLOS ONE, 2015, vol. 10, issue 3, 1-22

Abstract: Stone tool use by wild chimpanzees of West Africa offers a unique opportunity to explore the evolutionary roots of technology during human evolution. However, detailed analyses of chimpanzee stone artifacts are still lacking, thus precluding a comparison with the earliest archaeological record. This paper presents the first systematic study of stone tools used by wild chimpanzees to crack open nuts in Bossou (Guinea-Conakry), and applies pioneering analytical techniques to such artifacts. Automatic morphometric GIS classification enabled to create maps of use wear over the stone tools (anvils, hammers, and hammers/ anvils), which were blind tested with GIS spatial analysis of damage patterns identified visually. Our analysis shows that chimpanzee stone tool use wear can be systematized and specific damage patterns discerned, allowing to discriminate between active and passive pounders in lithic assemblages. In summary, our results demonstrate the heuristic potential of combined suites of GIS techniques for the analysis of battered artifacts, and have enabled creating a referential framework of analysis in which wild chimpanzee battered tools can for the first time be directly compared to the early archaeological record.

Date: 2015
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0121613 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 21613&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0121613

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0121613

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().