Description: The last decade has witnessed remarkable discoveries and advances in our understanding of the tool using behaviour of animals. Wild populations of capuchin monkeys have been observed to crack open nuts with stone tools, similar to the skills of chimpanzees and humans. Corvids have been observed to use and make tools that rival in complexity the behaviours exhibited by the great apes. Excavations of the nut cracking sites of chimpanzees have been dated to around 4-5 thousand years ago. Tool Use in Animals collates these and many more contributions by leading scholars in psychology, biology and anthropology, along with supplementary online materials, into a comprehensive assessment of the cognitive abilities and environmental forces shaping these behaviours in taxa as distantly related as primates and corvids.
Brief description: Josep Call is a comparative psychologist specialising in primate cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. He is also the co-founder of the Wolfgang Kohler primate research centre and has an extensive back catalogue of works including 3 books and nearly 200 peer-reviewed articles.
Review Quotes: "Tool Use in Animals: Cognition and Ecology may well be the new benchmark text for animal cognition. This book is clear, well-written, suitably broad in its approach, and delivers information that covers a review of the field in addition to new data. Its appeal will encompass readers from various connected academic disciplines, and [it] is an appropriate text for professionals and for students. This is an important and timely offering, and a happy addition to my library."
Kerrie Lewis Graham, American Journal of Physical Anthropology