Post date: Feb 04, 2020 4:39:17 AM
often enough i joke around with the trope of "well, when the zombies come for us" ... but i never thought about the chimps!
"These stone tools were wielded by chimpanzees, capuchins and macaques. The sites where they have been unearthed are the basis of a brand new field of science: primate archaeology.
"The tools are crude. A chimpanzee or monkey stone hammer is hardly a work of art to rival the beauty of an ancient human hand axe. But that's not the point. These primates have developed a culture that makes routine use of a stone-based technology. That means they have entered the Stone Age."
from "Chimpanzees and Monkeys have entered the Stone Age" @ bbc
it gets creepier:
"In May 2015, archaeologists working in Kenya published details of the earliest stone tools ever made by members of our lineage ... These "Lomekwian" stone tools were recovered from 3.3-million-year-old deposits. According to the team that found them, they were produced using techniques similar to those used by stone-wielding chimps and monkeys."
remind me to start panicking if i ever see a chimp adding another log to keep a fire going. it's all downhill from there ..
.. because once they eat cooked food, they'll chew less, they'll have need for smaller jaw muscles, and that opens up more room for brains! of course, not everyone agrees.
then again, if cooking is synonymous with intelligence .. then imagine chimps with basic, brute intelligence. sure, we humans are technically smarter ..
.. but we are also fallible to the things that we cannot imagine, and therefore don't plan for?
what if we think in overly complicated ways?
what if, in a war between chimps and humans, that we overlook a very basic strategy because we're "too smart" to have considered it..?
on a related note, the average chimp is between 40-60 kg (or 88-132 lbs), which means that i outweigh even the fattest chimpanzee within this range. on the other hand: at an underestimate, the average chimp is 1.5x stronger than a human of equal mass.
so an average 55-kg (or 121-lb) chimp is as strong as a 181-lb human .. and accounting for technological advances that lead to larger chimps (due to more food and possibly more nutritious), then 60-kg chimps would be more frequent specimens ..
.. and this is not even factoring the fact that most primates can jump substantially higher than humans, let alone have faster reaction times ..
.. you don't have to be smarter than a human to beat a human. with greater physical prowess, you just have to be smart enough.
...
people wonder why i always look so worried. this is just one example. let's hope the chimps develop emotion and compassion, with intelligence..!