EXPERIMENTAL PRIMATE ARCHAEOLOGY: DETECTING STONE HANDLING BY JAPANESE MACAQUES (MACACA FUSCATA)

• DOI: 10.1179/0197726114z.00000000037
• Publication Date: 2014-06-20T07:43:06Z
• Authors: William C. McGrew; Takuya Matsumoto; Michio Nakamura; Caroline A. Phillips; Fiona A. Stewart
• Keywords: 0303 health sciences; 03 medical and health sciences

AbstractNon-human primates using stones in nature provide a rare opportunity to compare directly the behaviour of use with the resulting lithic artifacts. Wild Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) customarily do “stone handling” (SH = spontaneous, solitary, non-instrumental and seemingly playful manipulation of stones). Ten populations of monkeys show at least 48 behavioral variants, 13 of which entail repeated stone-on-stone or stone-on-substrate contact that is likely to yield recognizable wear patterns. We collected 10 assemblages of stones after seeing them being used, as well as “control” stones from a nearby hillside. In the first experiment, human subjects of varying degrees of knowledge of SH were asked to separate handled versus non-handled stones. Overall they were unable to do so, but the best-informed subjects were more accurate than the totally naive ones. In the second experiment, another set of totally naive subjects was tutored on key points derived from the first experiment. They scored sig...