After learning sign language, making up "words" for things like banana or juice, or starting fires and cooking food, Kanzi, the 30-years-old male bonobo chimp again amazes researchers with his ability to make stone tools the way early human did.
According to a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Kanzi was given a task where he was to utilize his problem solving skills. Kanzi, reportedly, demonstrated his exceptional aptitude and intelligence by creating tools, which is a sign of evolving human culture and has never been found in any other non-human species till date.
Eviatar Nevo, of the University of Haifa in Israel, and his colleagues stuffed food into different sized logs to see how Kanzi extracts the food from inside the logs. While Kanzi's companion bonobo, who was given the same task, smashed the log on the ground and managed to take food out from only two logs, Kanzi took a longer and more sophisticated approach and extracted food from 24 logs. He used a total of 156 tools to break the logs. The tools, made by Kanzi, surprisingly mirror hominid tools found by archaeologists.
According to a NewScientist report "Kanzi used the tools he created to come at the log in a variety of ways: inserting sticks into seams in the log, throwing projectiles at it, and employing stone flints as choppers, drills, and scrapers. In the end, he got food out of 24 logs, while his companion managed just two."
Kanzi learnt how to make and use tools in the early 90s when he was taught to make fire.
According to Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a co-author of the paper and a primatologist who has been closely working with Kanzi throughout her life, "The mythology of human uniqueness is coming under challenge."
"If apes can learn language, which we once thought unique to humans, then it suggests that ability is not innate in just us," she told Smithsonian Magazine.
