Tool use by animals

Tool use by animals is the use of an external object to achieve a goal, such as obtaining food, communicating, or modifying a surface.

Object manipulation: Object manipulation is the controlled handling or modification of objects through movement and contact. Tool use depends on handling objects in ways that make them effective for a goal.
New Caledonian crow: The New Caledonian crow is a Pacific island corvid known for making and using tools to extract prey. Its hooked tools and manufactured probes are among the clearest cases of complex avian tool use.
Jane Goodall: Jane Goodall is a primatologist known for long-term research on wild chimpanzees in Tanzania. Her observations of chimpanzees making and using tools challenged the idea that toolmaking defined humans.
Tool: A tool is an object used to carry out a task or achieve a purpose. Competing definitions of animal tool use turn on what counts as a tool.
Animal culture: Animal culture is behavior shared within a group and transmitted socially across individuals or generations. Local tool traditions can persist through social transmission without being genetically inherited.
Animal cognition: Animal cognition is the study of mental processes such as perception, memory, learning, and decision-making in animals. Tool use can reveal how animals perceive problems, remember solutions, and choose actions.
Chimpanzee: The chimpanzee is a great ape native to equatorial Africa and a close living relative of humans. Chimpanzees use sticks, leaves, and stones for foraging, grooming, and other tasks.
Wolfgang Köhler: Wolfgang Köhler was a German psychologist whose studies examined problem-solving in chimpanzees. His captive chimpanzee experiments made tool-assisted problem-solving a central topic in comparative psychology.
Toolmaking: Toolmaking is the shaping or assembly of materials to produce an object for use. Making a tool is a more specific behavior than using an unmodified object.
Cumulative cultural evolution: Cumulative cultural evolution is the gradual improvement of socially transmitted traits across generations. Animal tool traditions raise questions about whether innovations can accumulate into increasingly complex techniques.

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