Subject: Speaking of crows ...
Date: Jan 19 09:02:52 1996
From: Susan Collicott - camel at serv.net



A friend sent this to me this morning. Thought Tweets would appreciate it.


LONDON (Reuter) - Crows living in New Caledonia's rain
forests are as advanced as Stone-Age humans when it comes to
using tools, a naturalist reported Wednesday.
Gavin Hunt of Massey University in New Zealand said he
watched highly sophisticated behavior among the crows. He wrote
in the science journal Nature that he thought the birds were
almost human-like in their use of the tools.
The birds, Hunt said, stripped a twig of leaves and
sometimes bark and cut it off just below a shortened offshoot to
create a hook. They also used a barbed type of leaf, which they
cut to a pointed taper shape.
Crows throughout the forest used the tools to dig insects
out from crannies.
``Observations were made of four crows manufacturing tools
and 68 crows using or carrying tools,'' Hunt wrote.
``In the breeding season I observed an adult with both food
and a tool in its bill land next to a juvenile, transfer the
tool to its feet, feed the juvenile, then pick up the tool and
fly off with it.''
Hunt said the birds not only used standardized tools, which
means they finished making a useful tool before they tried it
out, but used different types of tools for different purposes
and used hooks. He said humans did not reach this degree of
sophistication until the Lower Paleolithic era (Stone Age).
Many animals have been seen to use tools in the wild,
including chimpanzees who ``fish'' for termites using twigs, but
only rarely do they deliberately fashion a tool, and never to
the degree reported by Hunt.
Christian Boesch, a zoologist at the University of Basle in
Switzerland, said Hunt's observations raised questions about
what makes humans different from animals.
``All current theories about the evolution of mankind rely
on tool manufacture and use being central behaviors that
distinguished our early ancestors from apes,'' he wrote.
He said it was not yet clear whether the crows actually had
something approaching culture but added: ``All in all, Hunt's
fascinating paper gives much food for thought and argument.''
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