Mexico City.- A group of Argentine researchers have shown that the primitive tools, thousands of years old, found in northeastern Brazil, were made by ancient capuchin monkeys and not by humans, as some scientists maintain.
“We are confident that the first archaeological sites in Brazil are not of human origin, but rather belong to capuchin monkeys,” wrote the authors of the study published in The Holocene journal. The work was based on an in-depth investigation of the objects found in the Pedra Furada area and several nearby sites.
During the excavations carried out in a group of more than 800 archaeological sites, ancient stone tools made of quartz and quartzite boulders dating up to 50,000 years old were discovered. This led some specialists to classify them as evidence of the first human settlements in the region.
However, new findings in 2016 challenged that theory, showing that capuchin monkeys in northeastern Brazil are capable of making and using a wide variety of stone tools. This discovery raised the possibility that monkeys—and not humans—might be the authors of the artifacts found at Pedra Furada.
The researchers compared Pedra Furada’s tools to those made by capuchin monkeys today. They found ample evidence that the rocks used as hammers and anvils, to crack open nuts and seed pods, were simple in their manufacture and not made by humans.
“Our review of the evidence suggests that the ancient sites in Brazil do not actually belong to the first Americans, but are the product of monkey activity,” one of the authors, Federico L. Agnolín, said in a Council statement. National Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina. “The result was surprising: there was no difference between the supposed human tools of 50,000 years ago and those produced by monkeys today,” he added.
