of Cambridge and Primate Research Institute at Kyoto Univ. Learned behaviors, such as this exchange, often spread through chimp communities that live close together. Clive Bromhall/OSF/Animals Animals HINTS FROM CHIMP CULTURE After a juvenile Bossou chimp grooms a dominant male, the adult gives the juvenile access to cracking tools and a stash of Coula nuts.
Studies of the way modern chimps use tools may provide clues for piecing together aspects of human prehistory. As clutches of apes pound away with devastating precision, these nut bashers create an unholy din akin to a human rock band.ĪPING THE STONE AGE Chimpanzees in Tai National Park in Ivory Coast use stones for cracking nuts, and older chimps pass these skills on. Finally, smash the armored treats and let the shells fly. Next, gather the nuts and place them on the rocks. They are: First, lug large rocks to a spot near a nut-bearing tree, such as an oil palm. The researchers then compared their throwing motions with their freer technique.For chimpanzees living in a forest surrounding the village of Bossou in Guinea, cracking nuts is a serious task with important steps. After watching their best shots, Roach and team shifted the players’ bodies onto another branch of the evolutionary tree: With sports medicine braces, they strapped down their shoulders and arms to mimic a chimpanzee's body structure. thesis at Harvard University, enlisted 20 Harvard baseball players, and then tracked and analyzed their pitching moves. Roach, who worked on this project as part of his Ph.D. "You had to eat the brains of other animals for our brains to grow bigger," Venkadesan said. In modern humans the organ is a notorious energy hog, sucking up 20 percent of the body's energy. By two million years ago, Homo erectus had developed the ability to transmit energy from the big muscles around the waist all the way to the tip of the arms.īeing able to throw objects - perhaps rocks or sharpened spears - to hunt small animals would have had a tremendous benefit: the added calories would have supported a bigger brain. The act of throwing engages muscles in the legs, waist, hips, shoulders, elbows and wrist. The human body is one big elastic slingshot, said Madhusudan Venkadesan, an assistant professor at the National Center for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India, and a contributor to the study. College baseball pitchers were fitted with shoulder braces to make their movements more similar to early humans and chimpanzees. The slinging shoulder is the fastest movement the human body can perform, and one of a handful of physical tasks that humans can do better than other animals (long-distance running is another). The human throwing mechanism works like a rubber-band, storing elastic energy in tendons and ligaments in the shoulder and then releasing it in a burst, the researchers found. Neil Roach, a post-doctoral researcher at George Washington University, and his colleagues explain their findings in Thursday's issue of Nature. To figure out when our bodies first became pitching machines, experts on biomechanics studied the pitching movements of college baseball players, and pinned down the uniquely human body parts that allow people like Santana to throw like pros.
Highly trained pitchers and cricket bowlers can hurl balls at speeds up to 100 miles per hour. Unlike our closest primate cousins, the chimpanzees, humans can throw fast. Two million years before him, the very first human throwers probably also used their shoulders to bring home the bacon, flinging sharpened rocks or spears to hunt down game. Johan Santana of the New York Mets, the highest-paid pitcher in major league baseball, took home a salary of $23 million in 2012. Louis Cardinals in the first inning of their MLB National League game at CitiField in New York, June 1, 2012.
New York Mets starting pitcher Johan Santana throws a pitch to the St.
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