Podcast with Dorothy Fragaszy on tool use and capuchin monkeys

What can a small monkey cracking nuts with a stone tell us about the origins of tool use , and why is there still no theory to explain it? Primatologist Dorothy Fragaszy describes how wild capuchin monkeys develop remarkably skilled percussive tool use through years of socially supported exploration, challenging assumptions about what cognition tool use requires. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Dorothy Fragaszy joins Paul Verschure and Tony Prescott at the BCBT summer school to discuss her fieldwork on tool use in wild bearded capuchin monkeys. These small primates, weighing only two to four kilos, routinely lift stones half their body weight to crack extremely resistant palm nuts with precision and control that takes years to develop. Fragaszy explains that tool use in non-human primates is rare , only a handful of the roughly 560 known primate species use tools habitually in the wild , and that capuchins and chimpanzees appear to have evolved this capacity independently, separated by 35 million years of divergent evolution. The conversation explores why there is no unified theory of tool use in animal behavior, and how Fragaszy draws on two theoretical frameworks: the ecological psychology of the Gibsons, emphasizing how individuals actively discover affordances in their environment, and Bernstein's work on motor coordination, addressing how a system with many degrees of freedom achieves effective, skilled action. Young capuchins are inducted into nut-cracking through a socially rich context , attracted by the sounds, sights, and smells of adult cracking activity , and progress through years of exploratory play before mastering the coordination of anvil, nut, and hammerstone. Key topics include how tool use is defined descriptively rather than theoretically in animal behavior, why extractive foraging rather than anatomical dexterity predicts which species use tools, how capuchins manage the biomechanical challenge of percussive force without injuring themselves, what the developmental trajectory from play to skilled performance reveals about perceptual learning, and why the convergent evolution of tool use across distantly related species argues against strong genetic pre-specification. Part of the Convergent Science Network podcast series from the BCBT Summer School.