I find this very interesting. I hope you do too.
They have found evidence that these monkeys have been doing this for hundreds of years. I wonder where they will be in a few hundred more? Fighting with bronze weapons hopefully.
There is an interesting question. If another primate started forging weapons to fight each other, such as chimps (read about chimps, you will go “holy shit!”), how would we react? By forging weapons, I mean using bronze. Learning metallurgy. They start developing complex societies and start farming. How would we deal with that? Something to think about…
Interesting line of thought. But I think it’s got some bad assumptions. (This is the kind of conversation my friends and I used to always get into at 2am in a diner, way back before family/kids)
I think that forging bronze would require societal things that those monkeys don’t yet have. They’d need to mine, use fire, and probably other stuff I’m not thinking of. What would be far more likely is that they’d scavenge or steal already-forged metal cast off from humanity. Why would they go to all that square-one work when most of it’s already been done for them?
Oh yeah, I knew there were plenty of bad assumptions. Figured it would just be a fun thing to think about…I am more interested in how would we handle that, than the precise method the monkeys took to getting there.
I guess where I am going with the question, is not the how, but instead the ramifications. I like to think we (as humans) would just want to study this development, but ya never know. Some crazy religious group may decide that they are a threat to their god and want to end their existence.
It would be great if we could kick humans out of that area of Brazil and allow the capuchins to just evolve on their own and see how they developed.
Didn’t Crichton write about something like that in Congo? 😉