Wild macaques challenge the origin of intentional tool production | Hacker News Reader

Wild macaques challenge the origin of intentional tool production

science.org

59 pointsrntn20 comments

I noticed there seemed to be unnecessary use of jargon in the abstract. I asked ChatGPT to rewrite it in plain English and I think it did a pretty good job:

The sharp-edged stone flakes and flaked pieces that our ancestors intentionally made are important evidence of the development of technology in our lineage. This evidence helps us understand how early humans behaved, thought, and survived. In this study, we talk about a large collection of sharp-edged stones found near areas where long-tailed macaques were foraging for food. These stones are almost identical to the ones early humans made, which suggests that the macaques unintentionally produced them while searching for food. When we compare these stones to ones made by early humans millions of years ago, we find that they are very similar. If we didn't know that the macaques made these stones accidentally, we might think that they were made by early humans.

that's great, thanks for sharing! (though I'm not enough of a domain expert to know if it's accurate)

another solution to this would be if Science Advances were to require submissions to provide a "Significance Statement", like PNAS does, which would be essentially at the level of readability you provided.

I feel like the detail of "conchoidal edges" is important for the abstract, as it gives a good idea of how the edges look and why/how they are being unintentionally made. A search/replace of "lithic assemblage" to "stone tools" would accomplish much the same as your summary without losing any of the details.

It’s interesting just how bad of a summery that is compared to the human created abstract included in the text.

“It is now clear that the production of unintentional conchoidal sharp-edged flakes can result from tool-assisted foraging in nonhominin primates. Comparisons with Plio-Pleistocene lithic assemblages, dating from 3.3 to 1.56 million years ago, show that flakes produced by macaques fall within the technological range of artifacts made by early hominins. In the absence of behavioral observations, the assemblage produced by monkeys would likely be identified as anthropogenic in origin and interpreted as evidence of intentional tool production.”

That’s not plain English though, and I’m not seeing why that makes the plain English chatgpt attempt poor?

It’s both wrong and misleading. Think about this sentence literally: “These stones are almost identical to the ones early humans made, which suggests that the macaques unintentionally produced them while searching for food.”

First the similarities between these tools doesn’t suggest they were unintentionally created by the macaques. Next foraging and searching for food suggest different things, the macaques were breaking apart nuts with stones not looking for nuts the way “searching for food” implies. etc

Anyway, the “almost identical” bit is ignoring what’s actually being described. The stones created by macaques are quite distinct from what our ancestors made. So the similarities can help refine our understanding of those artifacts and possibly what may have kick started this kind of tool creation/use, but the differences make it clear which archaeological examples are of actual tool creation. At the same time current methods don’t account for the similarities and may conceivably misidentify some sites.

ChatGPT made some mistakes in simplifying the language, but I think a lot of humans might make the same mistakes because the article is just badly written.

The "unintentional" part is of course a ChatGPT hallucination that implies something that isn't there in the original.

In my opinion the article is great meanwhile ChatGPT made 4 significant mistakes in a single sentence. “almost identical” “early humans” “, which suggests” and “searching for food”

I don’t think that says as much about the algorithm as way people are doing evaluations. So yes people might mistakenly use “early human” when describing what was around 3.3 to 1.6 million years ago but that doesn’t somehow make it correct to do so.

> I think a lot of humans might make the same mistakes

Indeed, it seems ChatGPT is not that much of an improvement over the current state of affairs. At least not in the realm of science journalism.

We don't need automatic mistake-makers, eh?

Only the most extreme pendant would argue that "searching for food" is an inappropriate simplification of "foraging." ChatGPT also simplifies the term of art "lithic assemblage" which, devoid of context, I don't think most would understand.

And, regardless of what the rest of the article may say the original abstract does NOT make it clear that the "stones created by macaques are quite distinct from what our ancestors made"--that information is not present in the abstract and therefore ChatGPT has no chance to preserve that subtlety. (Notwithstanding the original abstract uses the phrase "almost indistinguishable" which a reasonable reader cannot interpret as "quite distinct".)

The issue here is context. “lithic assemblage associated with a primate foraging behavior undertaken by long-tailed macaques” could be reasonably simplified to “stone assemblage associated with long-tailed macaques [searching for food]” or other foraging synonyms. However when you drop the word associated and say “macaques unintentionally produced them while” you are now describing a more direct relationship.

Similarly the abstract clarifies the phrase “almost indistinguishable” with “likely to be confused with” etc which makes “almost identical” inappropriate.

Anyway, this kind of mistake shows up frequently because of how ChatGPT abstracts words and phrases. The approach has real upsides, but it falls on its face when subtle differences actually matter.

instead of decades of "who uses tools" maybe it would be more modern to consider what cognitive requirements exist for dreaming up using tools, in some more rigorous manner, perhaps mathematical.

Anthropologists have been trying to do that for decades, beginning with chaînes opératoires approaches in the 70s, to Haidle's cognigram approach ([0]), to the explicitly comp-sci inspired approaches like Perrault's [1]. They tend to suffer from the same set of issues, namely that they tend to be difficult to consistently apply within reasonable epistemological frameworks and unspecific in their arguments/predictions. Even when you have those, you still need to ground-truth things with the material record of "who was using tools when", so the kind of work discussed in the linked article remains valuable.

[0] https://doi.org/10.1017/S095977431200025X

[1] https://doi.org/10.1086/673264

Even if you had rigorous knowledge of the cognitive requirements, how would you verify its accuracy without going out and seeing who uses tools? How would you identify species meeting the cognitive requirements without seeing who uses tools (even if only in an artificial puzzle-solving context)?

good questions, i agree!

Macaques are the true under-appreciated menace. You’re quick to let your guard down because they’re not a chimp or gorilla, but you will regret it.

I remember in Cambodia they stole water from female tourists. And if somebody confronted them you had to be very careful to not get bitten. In a sense they reminded me of humans. I bet we would also be very crafty and annoying if we were held as pets or another more intelligent species took over the world.

The headline makes it sound like the theory was refuted, but the abstract instead makes it sound like the evidence that we have has been called into question. So it's not that anything has been disproven, it's just that we no longer trust the evidence we have.

Has the headline changed? It's currently "Wild macaques challenge the origin of intentional tool production", which doesn't imply anything is disproven, just that evidence is called into question.

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