#tool use

David Attenborough observing an orangutan trying to emulate hammering a nail. - The Life of Mammals, 2003.

Have a timeline cleanse of Ohtori using one of his tail feathers, that he's stripped at the end specifically, to scratch himself with

What we do have, though, is the fact that thanks to our ability to teach and learn so well, we essentially outsourced our evolution from biology to culture instead. And as we are all aware, culture evolves way faster than DNA ever could. So evolution rewards adaptation, and we just went and evolved not to adapt to a specific environment, but to be able to adapt really fast in general. Yeah we require tool use and community, if you set out a lone human infant in the wild they'll just straight up die. If you leave an adult without any tools or clothing, they will either attempt and succeed to make them, or die as well. But if we have both, we are the absolute champions of adapting to environments, by adapting our culture and tools to it, instead of needing to adapt our bodies.

[video description: video is a tiktok by user @perthzoo. The video shows a brown tufted capuchin in an outdoor enclosure with three walnuts in the shell. The monkey grabs a nearby rock that has a hole drilled in it and a cable attached to it, presumably attaching the rock to the wall or floor of the enclosure but we cannot see this. She uses the cabled rock to smash the walnuts, but she is not successful and the walnuts roll away from her. She gathers them back together and smashes again, this time one of the walnuts shoots off the rock. A male brown tufted capuchin approaches, he gathers a walnut and this time using the flat side of the rock, he smashed the walnut successfully and eats the pieces. While he does this, the female tries bashing her walnuts by hand against a large rock on the ground. While the video plays, light percussive music plays. End video description.]