MICHAEL CRICHTON

“That’s the way it looks,” Elliot said.“And they use stone tools?” she asked. “Stone paddles.”“Yes,” Elliot said. The idea of tool use was not as farfetched as it first seemed.Chimpanzees were capable of elaborate tool use, of which the most strikingexample was “termite fishing.” Chimps would make a twig, carefully bending it totheir specifications, and then spend hours over a termite mound, fishing with thestick to catch succulent grubs.Human observers labeled this activity “primitive tool use” until they tried itthemselves. It turned out that making a satisfactory twig and catching termiteswas not primitive at all; at least it proved to be beyond the ability of people whotried to duplicate it. Human fishermen quit, with a new respect for thechimpanzees, and a new observation—they now noticed that younger chimpsspent days watching their elders make sticks and twirl them in the mound. Youngchimps literally learned how to do it, and the learning process extended over aperiod of years.This began to look suspiciously like culture; the apprenticeship of young BenFranklin, printer, was not so different from the apprenticeship of youngChimpanzee, termite fisher. Both learned their skills over a period of years byobserving their elders; both made mistakes on the way to ultimate success.Yet manufactured stone tools implied a quantum jump beyond twigs andtermites. The privileged position of stone tools as the special province of mankindmight have remained sacrosanct were it not for a single iconoclastic researcher.In 1971, the British scientist R. V. S. Wright decided to teach an ape to makestone tools. His pupil was a five-year-old orangutan named Abang in the Bristolzoo. Wright presented Abang with a box containing food, bound with a rope; heshowed Abang how to cut the rope with a flint chip to get the food. Abang got thepoint in an hour.Wright then showed Abang how to make a stone chip by striking a pebbleagainst a flint core. This was a more difficult lesson; over a period of weeks,Abang required a total of three hours to learn to grasp the flint core between histoes, strike a sharp chip, cut the rope, and get the food.The point of the experiment was not that apes used stone tools, but that theability to make stone tools was literally within their grasp. Wright’s experimentwas one more reason to think that human beings were not as unique as they hadpreviously imagined themselves to be.“But why would Amy say they weren’t gorillas?”206