How did we get here? And by ‘we’, I mean you, me, and every other human. We’re the only animals that have made tools central to life. Why?

For millennia, we thought that humans were the only animals to use tools. It turns out, we just weren’t looking hard enough.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, ethologists (people who study animal behaviour) have uncovered hundreds of examples of tool-using animals. They range from our close cousins the great apes, to insects, reptiles, and many types of bird. Each new discovery raises questions about similarities to our own technological abilities, and the obvious gulf in tool complexity that still remains.

My Twig Technology project collects examples of tool-use from across the animal kingdom. It also aims to place these often unexpected behaviours into a wider framework around the evolution of technology. As an archaeologist, I naturally think in the long-term, looking for evolutionary reasons why a particular species might start or stop using tools. I’m not sure where this investigation will lead, but after 20+ years of literally digging into the past of humans, our ancestors, and wild tool-using animals, I’m certain there are surprises in store.

A note on the project name: Twig Technology is a chapter title in Last Chance to See, a 1990 book (and formerly radio series) by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine. It refers to the divergence between our monkey-like human ancestors and our close relatives the lemurs, the former of which slowly built up toolkits, while the latter did not. In Adams and Carwardine’s words :

Where the lemurs had been content to hang around in trees having a good time, the monkeys were ambitious, and interested in all sorts of things, especially twigs, with which they found they could do all kinds of things that they couldn’t do by themselves—dig for things, probe things, hit things.

Eventually, the authors note, those twigs morphed into telephones and aeroplanes, the very technologies that allowed Adams and Carwardine to travel to Madagascar and search for lemurs, rather than the lemurs crossing oceans to look for them.

At its core, Last Chance to See was an attempt to find rare animals around the world, before they went extinct. Douglas Adams himself sadly went extinct in 2001, but his legacy as an enquiring primate lives on. My hope is that this project will, in some small way, honour his inquisitive spirit.