Long and interesting.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmamm.2023.1281030/full
Front. Mamm. Sci., 09 October 2023
Tool use, or not tool use, that is the question: is
the necessity hypothesis really inconsequential for
the African great apes?
(abstract)
Investigating the drivers of tool use in animals
has recently received great attention because of
its implication in understanding animals’
cognition and the evolution of tool use in
hominins. The necessity hypothesis posits tool use
as a necessary response to food scarcity, but its
role is an ongoing debate. The largest body of
literature comparing animal tool use frequencies
is with regard to primates, particularly
comparisons between the Pan species. This supports
the hypothesis that tool use is rarer in wild
bonobos because of differential manipulation
abilities of chimpanzees rather than different
ecological needs. In this article, I aim to enrich
the discussion concerning the necessity hypothesis
and the ecological drivers of tool use in apes. The
higher feeding flexibility of bonobos may be a key
aspect to explaining the lower use of feeding tools
than that observed in chimpanzees. The diet
flexibility of bonobos is similar to that of the
lowest level of tool users among the wild great
apes: the gorilla. Gorillas can thus help to shed
further light on this debate. When fruit is scarce,
Western gorillas and bonobos rely more on widely
available proteinaceous herbs than chimpanzees,
who remain highly frugivorous. Chimpanzees may
thus face a greater necessity to search for an
alternative to obtain high-quality food:
tool-assisted feeding. An indirect piece of
evidence for this higher level of herbivory is that
the prevalence of gut ciliates in bonobos is double
that of chimpanzees. In each animal species, a
different combination of necessity, opportunities,
predisposition, and learning processes are likely
to be at play in the emergence of flexible tool
use in animals.
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