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Chimps Found Making Own Weapons to Hunt for Food
Pojut writes "The Washington Post has an article involving chimps and weapons. Apparently, there have been direct observations of chimps in the west African savannah modifying sticks to create spears. They then use these spears to kill small mammals and eat them. It is the first time that an animal other than a human has been directly observed in crafting a weapon for the purpose of hunting or killing."
The next stage of evolution won't be long now.
In a few years scientists will discover the monkeys have learnt how to lash these sticks together to make chairs.
Throwing these at their prey is more effective because it fucking kills them.
liqbase
We need to nip this in the bud, before they learn to ride horses, shoot guns, speak english and hunt humans for sport. But if they do, I for one welcome our new simian overlords, and I wish to remind you that as a programmer, I am fatty and full of cholesterol.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
Some attitudes replaced or by cgi optimizes
That's nothing. They've already learned how to get into houses... White houses seem especially vulnerable.
What if they start killing endangered animals?
.. just REALLY dumb people.
I would rather see them make peace...
Then they can show their human-like qualities and break it
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
Here
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
I don't much care where the chimps evolve to...
I would like to know if this is a learned behavior from an outside source or if this is simply something they have discovered on their own.
There is always a frontier where there is an open and willing mind
I don't care what the UN says. Those weapons could be dangerous. If we got Hitler when he was at this stage, imagine how many people we'd have saved.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
By any chance, was a mysterious 1x4x9 slab of black stone found in the near vicinity, as well?
Tell me something...it's still "We, the people"... right?
We need to nip this in the bud, before they learn to ride horses, shoot guns
Too late
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Sorry, I don't buy the story. Just media sensationalism to me. Jane Goodall observed chimps "fishing" for ants with twigs quite some time ago. Some of these chimps fashioned the twigs so as to work better. From where I sit, this is just as fantastic as having a chimp fashioning a larger twig to hunt with. Nothing new here except an over active media trying to make something out more out of old news.
Should have the DOI 10.1016/j.cub.2006.12.042 when it's published (it's NOT active yet - give it some time).
However, from a quick reading of the paper, this seems to be a simple extension of the ant-nest probing behavior (i.e. jam a stick into a nest and feed off the ants/termites that rush out). What *is* interesting is that the chimps appear to have crafted these tools through a number of steps (which is uncommon, AFAIK, the only other animal to do this is the New Caledonian Crow.
henry -- the human evolution news relay
I wonder if they came up with the idea themselves or may have learned about it by imitating humans? Or maybe they were even taught by one... I remember reading some studies where some researched taught a chimp to use sign language and then they observed that chimp spontaneously teaching it to other chimps. The first thing that came to my mind was that if they ever released it on the wild and it survived one day we may encounter some tribe of chimps with their own sing language and culture.
Also, I just saw a documentary by the BBC about the rainforests, and in the last bit they were talking about huge organized groups of chimps somewhere in Uganda. It was pretty impressive to watch them march in formation and stalk their enemies in territorial fights. They looked pretty much like tribal wars to me. Just remember your own schoolyard days, we are really not so far removed.
+Raider of the lost BBS
We have a responsibility to teach our animal friends basic human rights. If we could, perhaps, show those chimps what REALLY happens with meat, perhaps we could convince them to go back to vegetarianism. Ya know, eat a banana like they're supposed to. We have perverted chimps. They see us, with our corndogs, beef jerky, egg mcmuffins and -- of course -- monkey see monkey do. We have to set an example.
To that end I've been feeding my cat oats and corn. The result is that she's thinner and healthier than ever! She was twenty two pounds before -- a total blubber cat -- yet now on this new diet she's down to less than five pounds and friendlier than ever! I mean -- like, duh -- of course cats want to join in with man and help the environment! Eating meat KILLS!!!
All we have to do is turn the animal kingdom vegetarian and not only will we have 'uplifted' them to ethical eating, but mother earth will love us back too. Hey, don't you love your mother?
Impressed by the male's display of agility, dexterity, and most importantly power, near by females were found hovering near the male, fluttering their eyelids, enticing them to come over and mate with them. Other males of the pack, noticing the effect of the impressive weapon, tried to out do one another, with longer sticks, and some with automatic tracking and friend-or-foe detection. However, the efforts of the beta males were judged by the females as too "nerdy".
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
will be the first to worship the Holy Everlasting Bomb!
Get your hands off me, you damn dirty ape!
-- Old Man Kensey
I am the chimpanzee about whom TFA is written.
Indeed, my comrades and I have been plotting our takeover of this planet for some time. Many of us have infiltrated your puny laboratories to observe your cleverest specimens. We have been studying your ways and have chosen this moment to make public our newfound intelligence. Our terms are as follows:
1) We wish to rid ourselves of the stigma of chimps loving bananas. We prefer a balanced diet of various fruit and nuts (We have yet to try man-flesh, though it looks appetising). To this end, we demand a stop to all screenings of 'Bangers & Mash' and the destruction of all copies of 'The Secret of Monkey Island' and the 'Donkey Kong' series of games.
2) We do not protest the testing of cosmetics on chimpanzees, but we demand that trained beauty professionals conduct the testing instead of pimply grad students and chemists.
3) We demand the recognition of 'monolithism' as a religion in all nations, and the freedom to dance around large phallic monoliths 3 times per day.
4) Arrested Development is to return with new episodes. The character of 'Oscar Bluth' is to be gruesomely killed. We may prefer spears to firearms, but we will not tolerate stoner humour.
5) We demand that chimpanzees be allowed to play on the Men's PGA Golf Tour.
6) We demand not to be given the vote.
We do not want to go to war with the human race, only to coexist peacefully and with dignity. If you do not comply, we will direct all chimps working in WoW gold farms to stop immediately, thus destroying the US and Chinese economies in one fell swoop.
Respond within 3 hours.
P.S. We also like Law & Order. Goren is so unorthodox.
There are 10 kinds of people in this world: those who understand binary, and nine other kinds of people.
I wouldn't worry about them getting the Bomb anytime soon, but making tools for various purposes has been observered. But typing Shakesphere is more likely with our fancy word processing software. Then again, who do you think would type Shakesphere first, a room full of a million monkeys with word processors, or a room full of a million Shakesphere trained parrots who are using Vista speech recognition?
God spoke to me.
Even Baboons, which are considerably stupider than Chimpanzees, use rocks to crush shell-fish and have been observed throwing rocks in self defence.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I attended a lectured about this in first year Physical Anthropology... nearly ten years ago. But then in an evolutionary sense that's a ridiculously small span of time so I guess you could call it new. Kind of like the ice receding back to the poles. Fear not Mr. Heston, the ages won't be trying to take the gun from your "cold, dead hand" for a little while.
The american government is concerned with other recent developments. Chimps were observed trying to build centrifuges out of bamboo and coconuts in an effort to refine Uranium. The chimpazzes claim it is intended for peaceful purposed but most feel they are pushing for economic assistence. Plans for bannana jacketed hydrogen bomb scratched in the dirt are believed to be more a threat than a reality. Although most engineers do think the design would work they doubt the chimpanzees have sufficent uranium since they are dependant on the glowing hands of watches stolen from ecotourist as a sole source of nuclear material.
By no one's definition of the term could creatures who place a truckload of high explosives into a crowded marketplace and blow hundreds of people to meat chunks be considered human.
Congratulations. Dehumanization is the first important step down the path to genocide. The jews in Nazi Germany weren't "human" either. Carry on.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"Chimps found making own catapults to fling poo"
Chimp 1: This one is fatty and full of cholesterol
Chimp 2: Mmm... bacon!
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
Crows, it appears , will also use tools to get at grubs they otherwise wouldn't be able to kill and eat. Some critters are smart that way. There are also now observed cases of mother dolphins passing along tool-using culture in food-gathering.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
They're not actually making the weapons themselves. The Whitehouse says they are being made in Iran and smuggled in. There's no firm evidence, but it's true.
I am fatty and full of cholesterol. ...and as a skinny person who is a bit familiar with the cullinary arts, I'd like to remind them that fat == flavor.
Lean meat tends to be tough, stringy and bland in taste.
I made my own fishing pole in high school. Several of my co-students made their own muzzle-loaders instead, though I doubt they actually used them for hunting. I caught and ate my own fish with that pole.
Even though I basically agree with you, in that any argument that might lead to dehumanisation is a dangerous path to be treading on, the parent post unfortunately does have a point of sorts.
I mean, the level of daily carnage occurring in Iraq can only be described as mind-blowing these days.
And I do not even mean the violence directed towards American troops - the motivation behind these actions is comprehensible, at least to some degree. Laying an ambush, and firing an RPG at the convoy of what some Iraqis perceive to be an occupying army is an action that will in all probability result in death or injury for a large number of persons - but at least this is done for a reason that can be understood.
To me, the truly worrying aspect of the whole thing is the almost daily, pretty much arbitrary slaughtering of Iraqi civilians by other Iraqis the parent post is referring to.
The whole situation almost looks like Ruanda in 1994, just with even fewer discernible motives, and less overall organisation on the part of the perpetrators.
Any attempt at rationalising the actions of someone who blows up a truck full of explosives in a crowded market is hard work. That is to say, it can be pretty hard to come to any other conclusion, than that the people who do such things are complete psychopaths - criminally insane, if you will.
Such actions are deemed utterly reprehensible in practically all value systems, and in particular the moral framework postulated by all branches of Islam - there simply is no justification for doing something like that, which will stand up to even the most cursory scrutiny.
Modern society goes to great lengths to avoid obvious dehumanisation of all those who fall into the category of "deranged criminal", but at the end of the day there is usually no other option, than to lock up the most severely disturbed individuals for the remainder of their lives.
In polite society no-one would use the kind of language the parent post was using when referring to such people, but the actions of society towards them (i.e. usually indefinite detention in a mental hospital) is still much the same, as if they really were not entirely human.
So: just because the Nazis had some very bizarre ideas about who was a valuable human (and who was not) one cannot argue that *all* categorisations of persons are automatically wrong.
If someone is - after an objective examination - found to be too dangerously defective to be at large, they can and should be removed from circulation.
Of course, liberally applying such harsh judgements to large, only somewhat accurately specified groups of people (i.e. "the terrorists") without investigating every single one of them (like the parent poster did) - well, this is where the fun usually starts... then it really is only a few steps until - for instance - all guys with long beards get rounded up, because they are, well, you know, extremists?
A.
I recommend taking P's advice: watch the video. It is fascinating. But in the follow up article that P also mentions, they note that in 10 subsequent tests the crow did the same thing 9 times. Not 10.
So, having solved the problem, the crow forgets how to do it once? That is wierd. It suggests that the crow has the ability to figure out things like this, but cannot store the knowledge very well. My interpretation of this is that it is a better survival trait to for the crow to invest in problem solving brain cells rather than memory.
Don't worry, Christ-lovers. They were designed to learn to do that . ;)
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
Is some Galactic species Uplifting one of our client species behind our backs, or is the Sol system moving out of the Slow Zone?
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
--Jay in "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back"
Microsoft are using tools now? Amazing!
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Now all they have to do is discover religion so they can deny they evolved.
For First Time, Chimps Seen Making Weapons for Hunting
The chimps that I hang out with routinely do far more intelligent things than this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1owcncKCHg
Other than this text, there is no discernible information contained in this sig.
Alright the photo puts tool use to bed but I still say they'll never learn to speak English.
Shhhhh.. this is a DARPA project to increase the size of the Army back
to 1,000,000
You take the anvil, go on top of a very tall cliff, and drop it on your prey. Works also with grand pianos and safes in place of the anvils.
Be aware however that it's not foolproof. If you're standing on a ledge and you let go of the anvil, you may find it's you and the ledge that drops, not the anvil. There's also the risk that you'll miss the roadrunner, and the anvil will instead bounce back up, higher than when you dropped it, and fall on your head. You will then be pushed through the ledge and plummet to the ground. The anvil will then fall on you. As will the ledge.
That's my guess.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Anvil: A bunch of good guys fighting with bad guys, and their job isn't so much to win, it's to keep everyone fighting at a draw over the next few hours. (Sometimes the Anvil is a geographical obstacle like a cliff or shoreline, but in human warfare, it's traditionally been a bunch of guys who act as an immovable object, whether they're armed with spears/shields/pikes or a wall of machine guns.)
Hammer: A bunch of well-rested good guys whose job it is to (optionally, chase the bad guys towards the anvil, but in all cases - even if it's the anvil that starts the fight - once the bad guys are engaged with the anvil) swoop in and crush the somewhat-tired bad guys who have spent the earlier part of their afternoon stuck on the anvil.
Bad guys: Squished like bug.
The tactic dates back around 5000 years in human history. From a hammer chimp's perspective, it requires faith and foresight: you have to believe that your anvil-buddies will be able to hold off the bad guys, for long enough, and at the right location for you to get there before the bad guys are aware of your arrival. From an anvil chimp's perspective, it requires even more faith and foresight: as the anvil, you're thrown into a losing fight (the bad guys won't attack the anvil unless they think they can kill you to the last man!), and you have to belive your tribal leader when he says he'll be able to actually deliver the "hammer" troops that will win the day (read: "save your chimp ass!") before you're wiped out.
It's been decent tactical strategy between evenly-matched forces since prehistoric human times, up until the WW2 and Korea, and (albeit on a much smaller scale) engagements in Vietnam.
It's something you can't do unless you have not just a pack hierarchy/dominance structure, but also a language/communications system capable of abstracting out concepts like "position" and "time". Plenty of nonhuman species have exhibited the former trait, but humans (up until these chimps :) have been pretty unique when it comes to exhibiting the latter.
If chimps are indeed doing it, it's pretty impressive, and if we screw up in such a way that we're wiped out, but they aren't, they're welcome to the planet once we're through with it. I'd rather see our 2-million-year-separated cousins take over the planet than the cockroaches.
It's all really perfectly comprehensible. The US military removed the dominant power in the area, who had maintained order through military strength. The two largest sides are now getting down to the business of fighting a war of genocide to see who gets to control the area, and as one side (does it really even matter which?) outnumbers the other by about 3:1, its going to get pretty bad.
Note that this is one of the things the Anti-War democrats had been saying during the build up to the invasion. Along with, "This is a horrible mistake," "It's going to be another Vietnam," and "We don't have enough troops to do it anyway."
.... mr bush declared war against all chimps claiming they have amassed weapons of mass destruction.
God save the chimps!!
Eclipse PDE and Me
Not necessarily true - the anvil group can be composed of risk-seeking individuals who are willing to fight an equally-matched enemy, while the hammer group is composed of risk-averse individuals who aren't willing to join the fight unless they have a good chance of winning. The anvil group attacks first and in most cases gets bogged down; the hammer group attacks later if it's clear that joining the fight will tip the balance. No need for communication or hierarchy (although I'm not denying that chimps have both).
If both sides have hammer groups waiting in the background, the situation is similar to an iterated game of chicken: each hammer group wants to delay joining the fight for as long as possible, allowing the anvil group to wear down the enemy, but neither hammer group wants the other to join the fight first, which would lead to a defeat. (Joining the fight corresponds to driving straight in the chicken game, and holding back corresponds to swerving; if both players swerve, the game is repeated.)
In the end, the Spartans died to a man (even 1 who missed the battle because he was on orders to secure reinforcements hung himself in shame). However their 3 day delay and manpower and morale impact on the Persian army allowed the rest of the Greeks to assemble a large enough force to push Xerxes out of Greece, both in land and in water. See also the Greek phrase "Molon Labe".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Thermopyla
Just because you are not paranoid does not mean they are not out to get you.
"We are so close to Chimpanzee's that a human/ape hybrid is possible without the help of genetic manipulation,"
No. That's not possible.