ABSTRACT
Like humans, chimpanzees make and use tools. This has been generally appreciated since the work of Jane Goodall in the 1960s. However, despite this common ground, the implications of nonhuman tool behavior for human evolution have only rarely been pursued in more than a superficial way. Most treatments of nonhuman tool behavior fall within the long-established tradition of natural history. Until fairly recently, the emphasis of such studies had been descriptive and anecdotal, with the tacit goal of documenting the range of tool behaviors encountered in natural populations. Beck devotes a chapter of his book to the question of the evolution of tool behavior. Much of his discussion deals with the attempts to explain the emergence of tool behavior. Social science approaches tool behavior from an entirely different perspective. Whereas natural science views tool behavior from the perspective of adaptive niche, social science views tool behavior from the perspective of social context.
