tools

“Nearly every one of the 382 stone tools unearthed at Xiamabei is less than four centimeters long; making and using these smaller blades would have allowed early humans to do more work with less material. Handles helped make the tools easier to grip and more versatile; [Fa-Gang] Wang and his colleagues found one bladelet with part of a bone haft still attached to the stone.”

“Sometimes the birds would lose a tool, leaving it out of reach inside the cage. In that case, they’d reach for another tool but wouldn’t use it to retrieve the food—instead, they’d retrieve the first tool, then use that to get the food. One individual went three layers deep into this sort of recursion.”