King Kong (Titanus kong) tool use

Please note: this post contains minor spoilers for the films King Kong (2005), Kong: Skull Island (2017) and Godzilla vs Kong (2021). Images copyright Universal Studios & Warner Bros.

Almost 90 years after their screen debut, most movie stars are either retired or no longer with us. But since he first lumbered on-screen in 1933, one of Hollywood’s leading men just keeps getting bigger. Today we deviate from our usual exploration of natural animal technologies to take a closer look at the tool-using abilities of The Eighth Wonder of the World: King Kong.

Specifically, we’re going to cover the three most recent films to star the mega-ape: Peter Jackson’s 2005 re-make of the original King Kong, and the first two appearances of Kong in the ‘Monsterverse’ created by Legendary Entertainment - 2017’s Kong: Skull Island and 2021’s Godzilla vs Kong. To begin, though, we need to set the stage by spending a little time with the real animal that inspired the monster: gorillas.

A supporting role

There are currently three genera of great apes, two of which (like our Homo lineage) are of African descent. Those two are Pan, including the chimpanzees and bonobos, and Gorilla, the largest living primates. The third genus, Pongo, are the orangutans of southeast Asia.

Gorillas have been divided into a number of species and subspecies over time, but the main taxonomic split is into western (Gorilla gorilla) and eastern (Gorilla beringei) groups. As the names suggest, they inhabit separate parts of the African continent, with about 1000km of territory between them.

Unlike chimpanzees, wild gorillas are not regular tool users. They do have complex social and manipulative abilities, but these rarely extend to including objects as part of their everyday problem solving activities. In fact, there are only a few reports from decades of gorilla observations that suggest tool-use.

In most cases a wild gorilla has been seen using a branch or stem for support. For example, in 2004 a female western gorilla named Leah waded into a pool created by a group of elephants. She was seemingly hesitant about the water depth, and she grabbed a branch about a metre long to prod at the unseen bottom of the pool ahead of her, as well as using it as a kind of walking stick for support. Here’s Leah:

In the same clearing (Mbeli Bai in the Republic of Congo) a month later, a different female named Efi uprooted a small dead tree trunk. She then pushed it into the ground and held on with one hand while using her other hand to gather food from the swamp. When she was finished eating, she took the 1.3m trunk back out of the ground, laid it down over the marshy plants in front of her, and walked along it as she left her feeding place.

Both Leah’s and Efi’s tool use were reported by Thomas Breuer and colleagues from the Wildlife Conservation Society. Here, Efi drives the dead trunk into the ground, then holds it for support:

A short report from Cyril Greuter and co-authors in 2015 also endorsed the link between gorilla tools and support. They watched an adult female eastern gorilla named Tamu hold a bamboo stem steady, so that her infant could climb it to reach where she was sitting. However, the researchers debated what to call this behaviour, settling on ‘possible tool use’.

Jean-Felix Kinani and Dawn Zimmerman provide the only other documented case of wild gorilla technology, also in Rwandan eastern gorillas. In May 2013 as part of their work for Gorilla Doctors, they watched as a young female named Lisanga used a 20cm stick to collect driver ants from a hole in the ground. Both Lisanga and the male silverback Kigoma had already been bitten by these ants as they tried to eat them directly with their hands, so Lisanga’s stick use may have been an attempt to avoid the pain. After she was bitten again, she abandoned the tool and the ants.

Sticks and stones for breaking bones

That’s it for wild gorilla tool use. Now let’s see how the fictional version stacks up.

We can start with 2005’s King Kong, which used the same plot and many of the same characters as the original 1933 version. In this movie, Kong relies mainly on his strength and size to overcome other monsters, as well as annoyances such as buzzing aeroplanes. It contains only one notable tool-using scene, where Kong picks up a large stone in one hand, while holding the terrified actress Ann Darrow in the other. He then smashes the stone down on the head of a charging dinosaur (a Vastatosaurus rex), crushing its skull.

That’s the Vastatosaurus in the bottom left of frame:

Already we can see two differences with actual gorilla tool use: he uses a stone not a plant, and he’s a he. So far, every real tool-using wild gorilla we know of has been female. But Kong is all about breaking rules.

In 2017’s Kong: Skull Island, there’s at least a superficial nod to the gorilla trunk tool use seen in the Republic of Congo. Kong uproots a tree, and uses it as a kind of baseball bat to strike down a rampaging skullcrawler (Cranium reptant). However, he first uses a trick more commonly seen among termite-fishing chimpanzees or larva-hunting New Caledonian crows, stripping away all the extra side-branches and leaves from his weapon. He’s big enough now to do this with one smooth motion of his left hand:

The end result is a club with the tree roots intact, but otherwise straight and smooth. Kong swings it by holding onto the root end, which is the heavier end of the tree. That’s not the best way to make a club for maximum power (baseball bats are thinner at the handle for this reason), but to be fair he’s got little time to prepare before the fight is joined:

2017 Kong hasn’t forgotten about stones either. He performs a sneak attack on the skullcrawler by leaping with a stone held above his head, again aiming to crush his opponent’s skull. It doesn’t work as effectively this time, perhaps because he’s chosen a type of stone material that shatters on contact. All the energy he directs into the stone dissipates when it breaks apart. Even though he’s surrounded by what appears to be hard limestone, Kong has picked up some kind of yellowish sedimentary rock:

Back in 2005 he had the right kind of stone, here he doesn’t. From this we can infer that Kong is not as capable as, say, wild bearded capuchin monkeys at perceiving the qualities of the best rock types. Young capuchins cracking nuts at the Fazenda Boa Vista site in Brazil often use soft, breakable sandstones instead of the more reliable quartzite, although by the time they’re adults they rarely make that error. Perhaps this means that Kong is still a juvenile of his species, despite his size?

Still, even with his potential youth and inexperience, 2017 Kong has an extra trick up his hairy sleeve. Skull Island is a notorious ship graveyard, and Kong uses this to his advantage. By apparent coincidence, a ship’s propeller is entangled in one end of a long chain, which makes for a handy long-range weapon. This kind of tool-use doesn’t have much parallel with the animal world, unless we count things like an archerfish spitting water to knock down insect prey.

As the film heads to its finale, Kong takes a further step beyond any known tool-using primate in the wild: he uses a cutting tool. Sharp stone flakes have been an important part of human toolkits for more than three million years, but so far we have no record of monkey and ape tools that rely on fine slicing. It’s possible that Kong just wants to use the propeller in his hand to punch the skullcrawler, and his slicing action is an accidental instead of intended outcome, but the way he positions the blade and swings upwards suggests he knows what he’s doing.

It’s very effective:

That’s it for tool-use by the 2017 Kong. Before we leave him, though, we now have enough information to begin speculating on a side-issue for how tool-use develops and connects to the brain: handedness. Around 90% of humans are better at using their right hand for skilful tasks. In wild gorillas, recent research has found that while they can have a preferred hand for one-handed work (like pulling up a stem to eat), when both hands are needed they also show a right-handed dominance.

The sample is small, but Kong may buck the trend by having a slight preference for using his left hand. He strips the tree with his left hand, and uses that same hand as the primary one to shatter a rock on the skullcrawler’s head. He also grips the propeller in his left hand for his finely controlled slicing action. On the other hand (literally), he swings his tree-bat the same way a right-handed batter would do, and wields his chain tool with his right arm. As every scientific paper says, more research is needed.

An axe to grind

Which brings us to the most recent footage captured of Titanus kong. In 2021’s Godzilla vs. Kong, not only has our ape friend grown to the size of a tall building, he’s outside of his comfort zone and surrounded by unfamiliar human-made objects for much of the film. Given that primates exposed to human materials (such as in captivity) are known to more readily use tools, we should expect Kong to up his technological game.

We start the film, though, in the familiar tropical surrounds of Skull Island. Kong is still in the habit of uprooting and stripping trees when he needs a tool, although this time he’s more interested in having something long and pointy to throw than to swing:

The eagle-eyed ethologist will note also that Kong is now using his right hand to strip the tree trunk - and he also throws using his right arm. So much for that theory, maybe he’s just ambidextrous?

That’s the last chance we have to observe Kong in his natural habitat. The film’s ‘plot’ takes him into some strange new worlds, where he finds a trusted weapon to carry throughout his adventures. It’s an axe, made from a long limb bone hafted to a spiky plate from a Godzilla-like animal. The hafting is done with strips of what seem to be knobbly skin, from an unspecified giant creature.

The standard way to make an axe like this is to wrap the bindings for the haft while they’re wet, so that they shrink and tighten as they dry. This kind of combination tool needs more planning and precise crafting that we’ve seen from Kong previously - remember the chain-plus-propeller wasn’t assembled by him deliberately - which suggests that it was made by either a member of his species with a more complex skillset, or by a different species altogether. Nevertheless, Kong has no problem understanding both that the object is a chopping tool, and how to use it effectively.

When he does use the axe, it’s usually with his right arm, and we see that same pattern in a case of proto-tool use just before the axe shows up. Kong is annoyed by some large flying beasts (named Warbats), and he grabs one of them by the tail to use as a living club against another of its species. Back in 2005 Kong did also throw one dinosaur into another one in the heat of battle, but it wasn’t as clearly deliberate as the Warbat swipe:

Which brings us to King Kong’s adventures in the human landscape - or more precisely, Hong Kong (no relation).

Kong has his trusty axe with him as he helps destroy large portions of the city. But he is also able to seek out, pick up and use human-made objects that can help him in his efforts to win the titular Godzilla vs Kong fight. For example, at one point he tries to distract Godzilla by throwing something past the monster lizard. That something is a handy nearby crane that he plucks, aims and hurls into another building (left-handed) with barely a pause:

Kong also isn’t above re-purposing a more solid piece of infrastructure. He tears the circular top off a building so that he can use it to momentarily block Godzilla’s atomic breath. Just like his use of the crane in tactical deception, this use of an object in defence rather than attack adds another layer to Kong’s technological arsenal. Both the necessity of responding to his threatening foe, and the ready availability of metal and concrete constructions around him, seem to have allowed Kong to more freely express his tool-using tendencies. Back on Skull Island, even the large fortifications made by the traditional human inhabitants were primarily of wood. Kong is in a playground of possibility.

The battle between Kong and Godzilla gives us some insight into a point of contrast in how these two massive creatures approach tools. At one point, Kong manages to strike Godzilla with his axe, and it gets stuck. Instead of pulling it free with his hands - as we might assume Kong would do - Godzilla uses his mouth to grip the axe handle and fling it away. This behaviour has more in common with how hand-less animals such as birds or dolphins approach tool manipulation (although orangutans are also skilled tool-users with their flexible lips). Either Godzilla’s arms are too short or too weak to do the job, or he’s basically a face-first kind of monster, using his teeth both as a weapon and as his way of interacting with the world.

Note that, like so many of my own attempts to film interesting animal behaviour, the record of Godzilla’s axe throw is somewhat blurry:

Writing on the wall

That just about wraps up our survey, going from the support and ant-catching tools of wild gorillas to the stick, stone and city-based weapons of Kong. With my background in both animal behaviour research and archaeology, though, I wanted to end this post with an image that shows up only briefly during the opening credits of the 2021 film, linking these two fields.

It shows a painting, perhaps on a wall or ceramic vessel, with what may be Mesoamerican glyphs. It also depicts the film’s two protagonists, facing off. In Kong’s (right) hand he is holding an axe, while Godzilla, as we might expect, leads with his teeth. However, the form of Kong’s axe in the painting is not the hafted one we see later in the film:

Instead, the axe blade is inserted into a socket partway down the long handle. It doesn’t have any of the bindings, and it also seems to have a more standard ground-stone or sharpened axe head rather than a glowing titan plate (which admittedly are probably hard to find). Perhaps this is just an artist’s interpretation of what would have been a severely traumatic event to witness. But if this is accurate, what we might be seeing here is cultural evolution, the social process by which tool and other material forms change through time. These changes can lead to more efficient or effective tools, as well as reflecting the fads or styles popular at a given time. Could it be, therefore, that this ancient illustration shows not the Kong and Godzilla captured in the 2021 film, but their ancestors?

All we can do is hope that future sightings of these beasts help answer some of these questions. And if Monarch are handing out research grants to study titan technology, I’m happy to help out.

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