Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25936766-20170820043030/@comment-4010415-20170828190935

SpiritedDreaming wrote: Monkeys and coconuts. Humans learnt about the edible inside of coconuts by watching monkeys crack it open on rocks. They then copied the monkeys, found the meat of the coconut, and that was that.

Same goes for tortoises and eating them. Human's watched birds pick up the tortoise and dropped them from high up on a rock so the shell split, revealing the softer meat inside. People dropped heavy rocks on the tortoise or dropped the tortoise from high up to crack the shell just like the birds did, and they could eat tortoises.

It may not be the axes/spears that you think of when people say 'primitive tools', but learning from animals happened all the time in history. I remember watching something about a group of monkeys that live by a beach, and one of them discovered that if it dipped its food in the seawater, it gave it a new flavor. Other monkeys saw it doing that and copied it, and they ended up with the whole group salting their food with the ocean water.