Machines Like Us

Archaeologists working in the rain forest of West Africa's Ivory Coast say they have found a site where prehistoric families of chimpanzees fashioned crude stone hammers to crack open nuts for their food.

The flaked stones made by those savvy animals at least 4,300 years ago are remarkably similar, the scientists said, to those made by the earliest known prehuman tool-users -- the race of hominids known as Australopithecines, whose fossils show they lived some 2.5 million years ago or more.

The chimps, therefore, must have shared "cultural attributes" with the hominids who lived and went extinct almost at the start of the long and complex human lineage, said Julio Mercader an archaeologist at Canada's University of Calgary. Perhaps, Mercader speculated, the hominid race known as Australopithecines and ancient ancestors of tool-making chimps inherited their jointly shared "technology" from some common ancestor before the apes and human lineages split 6 to 7 million years ago.

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