Before human ancestors started making stone tools by chipping off flakes to fashion hand axes and other implements, their ancestors may have used plain old stones, as animals do now. And even that simple step required the intelligence to see that a rock could be used to smash open a nut or an oyster and the muscle control to do it effectively.

Researchers have been rigorous in documenting every use of tools they have found find in animals, like crows, chimpanzees and dolphins. And they are now beginning to look at how tools are used by modern primates — part of the scientists’ search for clues about the evolution of the kind of delicate control required to make and use even the simplest hand axes.

Monkeys do not exhibit human dexterity with tools, according to Madhur Mangalam of the University of Georgia, one of the authors of a recent study of how capuchin monkeys in Brazil crack open palm nuts.

“Monkeys are working as blacksmiths,” he said, “They’re not working as goldsmiths.”

But they are not just banging away haphazardly, either. Mr. Mangalam, a graduate student who is interested in “the evolution of precise movement,” reported in a recent issue of Current Biology on how capuchins handle stones. His adviser and co-author was Dorothy M. Fragaszy, the director of the Primate Behavior Laboratory at the university.