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Comment by snazz | Hacker News Reader

Building anything significant requires a relatively high level of dexterity, does it not? Even if crows could figure out how to build and operate tools that would allow them to build significant physical structures and objects, their bodies are not well-suited to doing so.

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It's not about building anything, really. The cornerstones are figuring out a reliable method to store knowledge over generations, and then figuring out mathematics more advanced than counting your food and potential mates. Having that, you have both an abstract framework for developing better understanding of the world (which is a necessity for better control over it, i.e. technology), and a way to implement it as work that spans generations.

I think more in line with reality is that we would be more likely and better off reading how to build such things. The knowledge already exists around us in our culture. I program every day but it's not because I'm some super animal genius who invented computers and programming and software design.

They can build nests. Nest building seems to often get overlooked in discussions about tool use, perhaps because shelter isn't traditionally considered a sort of tool? But it seems tool-like to me. Maybe nest building doesn't impress us because bugs do it too?

Birds might lack the physique to use human tools, but they have plenty of dexterity when it comes to building nests. They just seem to have relatively little interest in using that dexterity to build things which are not nests

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