Department of Biology, McGill University, Montréal, Québec H3A 1B1, Canada.
Behav Brain Sci. 2012 Aug;35(4):238-9. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X11002093. Epub 2012 Jun 15.
Evolutionary questions require specialized approaches, part of which are comparisons between close relatives. However, to understand the origins of human tool behavior, comparisons with solely chimpanzees are insufficient, lacking the power to identify derived traits. Moreover, tool use is unlikely a unitary phenomenon. Large-scale comparative analyses provide an alternative and suggest that tool use co-evolves with a suite of cognitive traits.
进化问题需要专门的方法，其中一部分是对近亲进行比较。然而，要理解人类工具行为的起源，仅与黑猩猩进行比较是不够的，因为这种比较缺乏识别衍生特征的能力。此外，工具使用不太可能是一个单一的现象。大规模的比较分析提供了一种替代方法，并表明工具使用与一系列认知特征共同进化。
