According to a new study published in the Royal Society Open Science journal, new evidence suggests for “tool-assisted hunting exhibited by chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) in a savannah habitat at Fongoli, Sénégal.”

Anthropologists have long been interested in the hunting techniques of chimps and other meat eating primates given the history of hunting in early human evolution.

Researchers observed female chimps fashion spears out of live tree branches, removing the leaves and sharpening the branches with their teeth in order to stab their prey. The researches say this ability supports evidence that the skill originated with earlier primates and that early humans may have hunted in a similar way.

The study found that nearly 70 percent of all prey captures were done by adult males, but the males tend to rely on their size and strength instead of tool use, but the female chimps ability to use and fashion a hunting weapon and made it possible for “individuals other than adult males to capture and retain control of prey.”

These chimps are the only non-human primate in the Fongoli region known to use weapons for hunting prey, but they also discovered that the male chimps in these groups allow the female or young chimps to keep their captures, a rare gesture since in most chimp groups the dominant males will steal the prey from weaker chimps.

But what does all of this tell us about evolution?

“The explanation for the pattern of tool-assisted hunting at Fongoli,” the authors wrote, “is that such hunting enables individuals who would be less likely to chase down larger vertebrate prey access to an energetically and nutritionally valuable food resource in a patchy savannah environment,” adding that the findings “supports the hypothesis that early hominins intensified their tool technology to overcome environmental pressures and that even the earliest hominins were probably sophisticated enough to fashion tools for hunting.” “The behavior of these chimpanzees demonstrates that hunting is less adult male-biased among our closest living relatives than previously believed when tools are used, and emphasizes the need to take into account the range of behavioral variation within a species, specifically when findings are applied to attempts to understand evolutionary adaptations,” the researchers added.

And according to Discovery News, “Early humans might have faced comparable conditions that led to greater reliance on meat consumption and efficient hunting methods.”

These findings, in addition to other evidence on primate tool use give us a unique window into evolutionary history and allow us to see how early primates and common ancestors between humans and modern non-human primates may have developed skills leading to or resulting from our divergence and differences over hundreds of thousands of years.

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(h/t: Raw Story)