Exactly. Mentioned briefly in the article (e.g., the habituation of chimpanzees to researchers), but the idea of non-human "culture" has been strange to/dismissed by researchers for some time, only because we did not have enough data to understand the diversity of their behavior. This is almost certainly an example of researchers simply getting new (and interesting!) data.
I'm a little flabbergasted that the idea of animals using tools is so groundbreaking. I've seen squirrels pick apples up off the ground, climb to the top of a tree, and drop the apple over and over again to break it into small convenient pieces. I've seen birds do the same thing too, with shellfish. You see all kinds of stuff when you have your eyes open.
I don't think it's the tool use, its the specific tool use - they are observing a new behaviour. It's not that they assumed they couldn't (I mean, look up "Chimps using tools" on youtube), it's just a novel behaviour, which is neat to see. It's not something groundbreaking, it's just notable.
True, they've probably been doing this for a million years. But they're our closest relatives, and we have living examples of primates that are at various points of eating vegetation/meat, using tools and not, etc...
Seeing a primate eating meat and using tools despite being built to eat vegetation suggests a link to our own past.
Turtle smashing mental level requirements are not much higher than social media surfing, but there are plenty of examples they can learn complex sequence of steps and pass it on.
"Turtle smashing mental level requirements are not much higher than social media surfing" -- what leads you to this conclusion? It is not clear to me that this is a trivial statement.
I'll second this anecdotally because I have no problem browsing hackernews all day but yesterday I fought desperately trying to crack a coconut for half an hour.
They've never been documented eating any reptiles? Not even something trivial like lizards? That seems so odd, I don't know why but I assumed they ate just about everything.
As far as my brief reading has got me, despite what was my general understanding until now they generally eat very little meat at all [1]. I guess it makes sense in this case that they're never been found eating reptiles.
I'm fascinated that tortoises are in fact reptilian since I'd previously thought that reptiles were a strictly meat-eating class. Also that an ancient battle formation was named after them.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 79.6 ms ] threadSeeing a primate eating meat and using tools despite being built to eat vegetation suggests a link to our own past.
Turtle smashing mental level requirements are not much higher than social media surfing, but there are plenty of examples they can learn complex sequence of steps and pass it on.
https://phys.org/news/2016-10-wild-chimpanzee-mothers-young-...
I think that the lede is more that they're using problem solving to eat the turtles by breaking their shell.
[1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/how-to-eat-l...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZerUbHmuY04
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_iguana#Feeding
>The marine iguana forages almost exclusively on red and green algae in the inter- and subtidal zones.