Access
To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right).
Letters to Nature
Nature 256, 488-489 (7 August 1975) | doi:10.1038/256488a0; Accepted 26 June 1975
Defensive stoning by baboons
WILLIAM J. HAMILTON, III, RUTH E. BUSKIRK & WILLIAM H. BUSKIRK
- Division of Environmental Studies, University of California, Davis, California 95616
Abstract
REPORTS of the use of tools in offence or defence by wild animals is limited to accounts of chimpanzees throwing branches at conspecifics, potential predators and at human observers1. Anecdotal accounts of stone throwing by baboons2 have been dismissed on the basis of the unreliability of correspondents and the improbability of oriented throwing by a quadruped anatomically incapable of overhand throwing3. In spite of several years of field study elsewhere in Africa, often in rocky terrain, there are no reports by professional field observers of deliberate stone throwing by baboons4–7.
To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right).
