Capuchin monkeys have been using stone tools for around 3,000 years

ONE OF THE most famous edits in cinematic history comes early in “2001: A Space Odyssey”. A primitive hominid hurls a bone club into the air, and a match cut to a spacecraft instantaneously tells the millennia-long story of human ingenuity. Tools maketh man. But there was never a human monopoly on tool use, as a new paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution shows. A team led by Tiago Falótico of the University of São Paulo, in Brazil, and Tomos Proffitt of University College, London, has demonstrated that a species of monkey called the wild bearded capuchin has been employing stone tools for perhaps 3,000 years, and that their use of the technology has changed over the course of time.