From the Vault: Animals Throwing Stuff, Part 3

We discussed the ability of elephants to throw with their trunks, and we talked about mongooses doing brutal reverse granny shots to bypass the defenses of armored millipedes and, as Mick Jagger would say, get the meat. Today, our discussion continues with a very important consideration.

the human imagination. And I guess you could ultimately go beyond the realm of humans into other things as long as you could somehow cobble together a script around it.

was about a terrible NFL team. I think there's something like the California Atomics or something, and they end up deciding to field a donkey as a kicker in the game, and I guess it works out for them. Again, there's nothing in the rule, but this says a donkey can't play inn FL.

in which a chimpanzee plays soccer. There are also I think thirteen additional Airbud sequels and spin offs.

It's just ultimate cute exploitation. But this was also the series that in an episode long ago, we suggested should do a crossover with the Clive Barker verse and create hell Buddies.

That one has interested me because I noticed its stars Elliott Gould, and it was also one of the films you could pull up on the Criterion Collections streaming service at least several months back.

throwing in it doesn't seem to be throwing anything. So we really only have to worry about the concept of dogs playing scoring games with balls and chimpanzees playing scoring games with balls. Real quick, let's talk about dogs. And you may have additional expertise on this to throw in

here experience from being a dog owner. But as far as dogs go, they can obviously be trained to do a lot of different things, often very impressive things, including chasing, after catching, and fetching balls and sticks, and as is evident in many videos online, they can also be trained to bounce basketballs into baskets off of their noses, off of their snouts.

In those cases, I've seen dogs throwing the toy in order to try to extract the treat, but it's very haphazard. They're not like hitting a target. They're more just kind of like throwing it wildly by tossing their head and it'll bounce off the wall or something, and maybe the treat will tumble out.

of course well documented online. In fact, when we were researching other aspects of animals throwing things, some of the search engines I was using, We're very excited to give me content of animals throwing feces, particularly chimps throwing feces. I was not looking for this information at the time, but the Internet really wanted to desert it to me.

not very generalized, They're not very free form. Instead, they seem to be pretty tightly controlled, instinctually determined behavioral patterns, whereas I don't know, you could say, maybe like a chimpanzee pooping and then throwing its poop at someone or something that seems to be a little more free form.

The poop is something that will happen eventually, will be in the enclosure, and therefore is available to pick up, manipulate, and throw if desired, whereas in the wild there are other competitors out there, the other things that could pick up, like sticks, like rocks that could be thrown, and we have seen them throw such objects both in captivity but also in the wild, and so it seems to be a situation where there are far more incidents of poop

throwing in captivity versus the wild, though they have been observed to throw poop in the wild as well.

things to simulate poop. But the idea was here that this this modified E. Coli would produce a plastic that can then be used in a three D printer to produce simple tools like wrenches and screwdrivers. So the aim here would be sort of twofold. So say you're going to Mars on an extended mission. This way you don't

have to bring those tools with you. You don't have to pay for the cost of getting those tools into orbit and then to Mars, and then likewise you have to worry less about getting rid of human waste on the journey. That's quite brilliant. Yes, I one day hope to have all kinds of plastic tools and toys made out of poop. Now, this is sort of another aside, but this gets back to chimps specifically, if you might get into the question of why do chimps throw poop specifically, even if they

have a choice of their objects to throw? And I found this rather fascinating older paper. This is from nineteen ninety six. It is a rush and paper titled a neglected form of quasi aggression in Apes Possible relevance for the origins of humor. This was the current anthropology and I'm just going to read a quote from it here.

According to people working at the Pavlov Center, at least four adult chimpanzee males and one adult female would also throw feces at people, expressing joy when the target was hit by making a playface, hooting, clapping, and stamping around. They did not, however, throw feces at persons of whom they were afraid. We have received the same information from people in charge of chimpanzees at the Saint Petersburg and Moscow zoos at the Moscow Zoo. The same behavior was observed in orangutanks.

very fascinating. I mean, even you think of like a zoo environment, for example, the chimp is attempting interspecies communication, even if that interspecies communication consists of throwing a rock or some poop at somebody, right, but it's not always spontaneous. Sometimes it is premeditated in the case of stone throwing,

that's been observed. One of the more famous examples of this was Santino the chimpanzee born in nineteen seventy eight, who made headlines multiple times, and I think sometimes the news cycle would come back around to him because in addition to being a pretty talented artist, he also had some issues with people, like to collect stones ahead of time so that he could throw them at visitors to the Throuvic Zoo in Sweden.

There's a fair amount of coverage about that, but I don't think everybody necessarily connected that this was the same chimp that had made headlines in the past for the throwing of rocks.

cultured acts of human behavior something. And this is both from an archaeological standpoint, when archaeologists find examples of stones that have been gathered together in one area, and also I think we just individually encounter this as well, whether you see piles of stones that are put there for a purpose, Like perhaps you're on a nature walk and these stones are gathered together to help mark the path you're supposed to be on, or you often see this

done out of for pure amusement. At times, you'll just find places where humans have been around multiple stones and there's like kind of this irresistible urge to arrange them or stack them up.

hollow tree or something until they really pile up. That suggests, well, maybe they're creating some kind of like ritual monument, like you know, like humans would create a care and for some kind of purpose to be observed and to mean something. I don't think there's really evidence present to jump to that kind of conclusion, because that seems like a different order of that symbolic behavior that, as far as I know, is probably only the province of humans. But I guess

we could always be surprised. It seems kind of a speculative leap to me, but it's still really interesting behavior. Nonetheless, I mean that the chimpanzee is piling up the stones for some interesting reason, even if it's not to like create a symbolic marker for other chimpanzees to see.

They point out that stone throwing in chimpanzees was first described by Jane Goodall, who documented aimed throwing of sticks and rocks by male chimpanzees during agonistic displays, and this behavior was later described by researchers for other non human primates as well, including Japanese macaques, wild baboons, and capuchin monkeys.

Female bearded kbuchins have also been observed to throw rocks during courtship interactions, which I guess this would be like tenderly throwing pebbles against a window to get their lover's interest at night without awakening the parents downstairs, or maybe not.

what we're talking with the chimps here. Also, the paper points out the Japanese macaques engage in stone handling, which isn't tool use but solitary object play behavior, and it actually results in use where patterns on the stones and the stones will then end up accumulating at quote unquote PlayStations.

in female chimpanzees. But they'll take take a stick and sort of sort of sharpen it with their teeth or chew on it, you know, to get something like a point, and then use that stick to stab into the hollows of trees where there's a sleeping bush baby and spirit and pull it back out to eat.

behavior as a modification of male chimpanzee display. This would make it mean that it would be kind of like an addition to their hand and foot drumming, which is a ritualized behavior found in all known chimpanzee populations, and the use of the stones, throwing the stones into a pile, into the hall of a tree, et cetera, would be a way of enhancing this particular activity.

You're a little potentially more nebulous, because you're getting in to this area where there is a connection between quote ritualized animal behavior and the repeated stereotype behaviors commonly observed during human rituals unquote, which granted that could cover a great deal of ground.

to jump to religion you say is ritual use. But then there are these cases that we observe in non human primates today where it's like, it's not even clear what this is for. Yeah, but I wanted to now address the topic of the evolution of throwing in humans because to the extent that animals throw, and we know from everything we've looked at in these episodes that many, many non human animals do throw, they don't throw like

we do. No animal out there comes anywhere close to the combined levels of force and target precision that humans are capable of. And to further explore this, I was looking at an interesting paper by Michael P. Lombardo and robert O. Diener published in the Quarterly Review of Biology in twenty eighteen called Born to Throw The Ecological Causes

that shaped the Evolution of Throwing in Humans. Now, I'm not going to address all the subtopics in this paper, but wanted to pull out some highlights that I found really interesting. So the authors begin by identifying two major turning points in the relationship between human anatomy and human behavior that sort of drove the evolution of the modern

human body. And they identified the shift to bipedal locomotion that of course is well known, but also the development of forceful overhand throwing, and they argue that the former has gotten a lot more at tension than the latter, but the latter might be considered equally important, if not more so. There are other animals that throw in various scenarios, as we've documented, but humans are the only primates that can be observed to regularly throw targeted projectiles in order

to kill or cause injury to another animal. And I think also it's worth noticing not only how much better we are throwing than other animals, but how this is pretty much the only feat of physical strength. They're one of the only feats of physical strength where we surpass our closest primate relatives. So compared to other primates like

chimpanzees and gorillas, humans are incredibly weak. The authors cite some research it's older research from nineteen twenty six, attempting to quantify the difference between the you know, like the arm strength of a chimpanzee versus an adult human and this. This older study concludes that, controlling for body size, an adult male chimpanzee is on average roughly four times stronger

than a fit adult human male. Now this is probably a very approximate guess, but I think it is utterly uncontroversial to say that chimps are way way stronger than humans. A chimpanzee could probably just rip your head off.

I'm going to come back to some research he was involved in a minute, but just quickly here, Roach cites figures that even an adult male chimpanzee who has specifically been trained to throw a ball, So this is not just a naive chimpanzee who's never done this before. This is one who has humans have trained them to throw

as hard as they can. One who has been trained can only achieve top throwing speeds of about twenty miles per hour, whereas among humans, twelve to thirteen year old recreational baseball pictures can achieve pitches above sixty miles per hour, and professional adult baseball players can throw fastballs in the like ninety to one hundred mile per hour range. So

isn't that bizarre. A chimpanzee might be simultaneously three or four times stronger than you in general, but you are probably right now at least three times stronger than the chimp when it comes to throwing.

and complex behavior, forceful targeted throwing is. It requires split second mental calculations regarding force, angle, and timing, as well as coordination of lots of precise and rapid movements by many different parts of the body. So think about all this stuff. Think about everything your muscles and your brain have to do together to throw a rock and hit something,

especially if the thing is moving. You have to track the target, anticipate future motion of the target, take into account the physical features of the projectile, for example, like its weight and its shape and so forth, which will affect how it travels. You have to understand the object

you're throwing to throw it effectively. You have to understand how exactly to draw back and extend the arm for the throw, how to grip the object in preparation for the throw, exactly how and when to release the projectile from the grip. And that's like a you know, tiny, tiny window, and you have to time all of those muscular movements in exactly the right sequence, which might all

take place in less than a second. Throwing behaviors are one of the fastest motions produced by the musculoskeletal system of the human body.

So anyway, that we are so much better adapted for targeted overhand throwing than other primates, even our most closely related primates like chimpanzees, suggests specific selection pressure on our ancestors, favoring the development of skeleton, muscular, as well as neurological adaptations that allow us to excel at throwing to the

extent that we do. We seem quite clearly biologically shaped for throwing, and that requires changes in multiple parts of the body, the muscles and the skeleton of like the arm and the shoulder and the torso, but also the brain and the nervous system. Now, lest you think, I don't know how useful in real world struggle could throwing be. I think this is uncontroversial. But the authors do spend a fair amount of time just providing evidence that they do.

Observations of pre modern practices in hunting and warfare to show the prevalence and utility of targeted overhand throwing. They're like, yes, it's incredibly useful. They say that human quote, hunters and warriors used human muscle power to propel bolas, boomerangs, darts, knives, sticks, stones, and spears thrown with or without the aid of oddo lattles.

If you're interested in the oddo loattle. By the way, we did an episode of invention on that a long time ago that I think was one of my favorites. I remember that being really interesting. Anyway, many of the technologies that replaced these practices in hunting and warfare have simply replaced the muscular power with mechanical or chemical sources of energy to power the throw, and that can be everything from the tension of a bow string to the

combustion of gunpowder in a firearm. So the question is how did our hominin ancestors make the leap from something like the occasional low specialization, low utility tossing behaviors we see in our closest primate relatives like chimpanzees, to the kind of habitual, powerful, targeted overhand throwing that is characteristic of humans today. Now, like many questions in evolutionary anthropology. We don't know the answer to this one for sure.

This is not one where somebody can tell you the answer, but there are a few hypotheses that are informed by some interesting evidence that we can take a look at. Now, before we can figure out how that advance from sort of occasional, low utility throwing to human style throwing might have occurred, it's worth discussing the major hypothesized uses of

overhand throwing in an ancestral hominine environment. Hunting is a very obvious one, right, Being able to throw a rock or a stick with force and hit a prey animal would be extremely useful, But the authors also call out intra specific and agonistic encounters, which means conflict with other

members of the same species. And then, finally, I thought this one was really fascinating, and this one may help explain and help you see how this bridge could have been crossed behaviorally, the practice of power scavenging, which means not just regular scavenging, not just wandering around looking for a dead animal to feast upon. Power scavenging means waiting for other predators to take down a prey animal and then chasing those predators away. From the kill and taking it for yourself.

but now you're going to do an also hard thing. You want to get in there, drive the predator away long enough to get yourself a little bit of the meat as well.

lions and hyenas, but contained smaller and less dangerous predators such as leopards and cheetahs. So if that's correct, it's it's maybe easy to imagine how with leopards and cheetahs you could more more plausibly chase them away, or early hominins could have chased them away from a kill by throwing things at them, even without very specialized weapons, maybe just by like throwing rocks or unmodified sticks. And this could be thought of as a kind of high risk,

high reward strategy. Like with power scavenging. You can get a big meat payday with relatively little energy investment since you don't have to chase the prey animal down yourself. But it's dangerous. You do have to confront one or more predators for the kill, and this type of strategy might not be worth the risk if you have to fight a leopard with your hands or with handheld weapons. But if you can just throw rocks at it from a distance until it runs away, that could be a really good deal.

ago in Africa. Hunting spears with their center of gravity one third of the way from the tip, suggesting that they were thrown were found in Germany and date from three hundred thousand to four hundred thousand years ago. These two examples are evidence that manufactured weapons were thrown by members of the Homo genus at least three hundred thousand

years ago. But while it's harder to be certain about what happened before that, the authors infer that human ancestors were probably throwing sticks and rocks going back a couple million years, so there was probably use of throwing of

less modified or unmodified objects from the environment before. We have evidence of these modified throwing weapons from like three hundred to four hundred thousand years ago, And one idea I came across in trying to locate the origins of habitual forceful throwing is based on studies of anatomy, and this brings us back to that researcher I talked about a minute ago, the anthropologist Neil Thomas Roach, who along with some colleagues studied the bodies and behavior of practiced

human throwers like baseball pitchers. And let's see the citation here is Roach vinca deson Rainbow and Lieberman from twenty thirteen published in the journal Nature, and the paper title is Elastic Energy Storage in the Shoulder and the Evolution of high speed Throwing in Homo And basically, these authors contend that the anatomical difference that makes human so good at throwing is our ability to store elastic energy in

our shoulders. So it's not just like the strength of the muscles, but the fact that the human body is designed to sort of cock back the arm before a forceful throw, and a human essentially creates a biomechanical sling shot by stretching the tendons and the ligaments surrounding the scapula or the shoulder blade, and this tension could be thought of as analogous to the tension in a bowstring. It allows very rapid extension of the arm after the wind up. Now how come we can do this and

our nearest relatives like chimpanzees cannot. The researchers here argued that there are basically three important anatomical changes that are found altogether around two million years ago in the species Homo erectus. So these three changes are the expansion of the waist and this sort of lets the torso rotate above the hips, which generates more rotational force. So when you're like cocking your arm back to throw overhand, you typically you twist your torso, and that change in Homo

erectus allowed them to twist their torso like that. The second is a lower positioning of the shoulders on the torso, and this changes the orientation of the muscles around the shoulder, again helping us to store more energy in the wind up of an overhand throw. Again, this is found in homoerectus. And then the twisting of the humorous bone, which is the upper arm bone, and that twisting is yet another way to stretch the bow strings, storing up even more

energy in the wind up. And you can see these differences, there's a diagram. They include you might be able to look up for yourself if you see a comparison of like a muscle diagram or the scapula of a chimpanzee and a human, and you can see some of these differences, particularly the lower position of the shoulder on the human body. You know, you look at the upper musculature of a chimpanzee and you're like, well, I really would not want to be clubbed by this animal, And I imagine that

animal can really like climb a tree really well. But there's there's some kind of different twisting of the shoulder and the pectoral muscle in the human body that apparently allows us to perform this cockingback or wind up behavior before an overhand throw so much better than a chimp can.

The homoerectus was apparently dining on more meat. Now, coming back to that paper by Lombardo and Deaner from twenty eighteen, they examine a number of other different things, like talking about the prevalence and effectiveness of overhand throwing in warfare and hunting, and they also look at things like sex

differences in throwing behavior. For example, in chimpanzees, there's some evidence that male chimpanzees tend to throw more and relative levels of lethality and targeted throwing behaviors and so forth. But to come to the conclusion regarding that transition, like how did the leap happen from you know, sort of occasional, non specialized throwing like we see in chimpanzees today to the habitual, targeted, forceful overhand throwing that humans can do.

The conclusion, they argue, is that this adaptation grew out of quote a way for throwers to manipulate the behavior of targeted individuals during intraspecific agonistic interactions and then later transitioned into use during power scavenging and hunting by hominins, perhaps in the australiopithesceenes. So why do they think it started with manipulating the behavior of other hominins within the same species and agonistic interactions. Well, I think we can

get some clues by looking at our closest primate relatives. Again, this in no way clinches the argument. We don't know for sure, but it's an interesting line of evidence. So they say, if you look at our relatives like chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and so forth, these animals have all been observed throwing. But when and how do they throw? Well, do they throw to hunt? The answer there seems like either no

or almost never. There are almost no claimed observations that any of these animals use projectiles for hunting, with basically one possible exception, and that's a report by Jane Goodall actually in nineteen eighty six, where to read from the paper here quote Goodall reported three observations of throwing by hunting chimpanzees. In two instances, stones thrown by an adult male may have been intended to cause the prey adult

bush pigs to run rather than to harm them. In another instance, six male chimpanzees hunting baboons threw stones at male baboons that were attacking the hunters. None of these accounts closely resembles the highly skilled aimed throwing used by human hunters, so even if these instances count, they appear

to be somewhat ambiguous and relatively unique. There are basically no other reports of apes throwing to hunt, and instead apes and monkeys seem to use throwing as part of communication behavior during encounters with other members of the same species or sometimes with other animals such as humans. Most often it's used for agonistic interactions, a kind of threat display that you might throw rocks or sticks at another member of the same ape species or another animal to

sort of drive them away or intimidate them. So if a chimpanzee is trying to display dominance or intimidate another one, or trying to get an interloper away from the group, throwing rocks and sticks is a common behavior there, but it's also not just aggressive interactions those are the most common. There are, also, in fewer cases, more benign examples, like particularly in bonobos and some monkeys, where throwing can be a bid to initiate play or some other type of non threatening communication.

the predator away and you take the meat. This creates an association between throwing to threaten and a meat reward that could increasingly lead to throwing to hunt directly, especially if you were able to create modified projectiles such as spears. So it makes me wonder like if those specific chimpanzees observed by Jane Goodall, if they were in fact using rocks to hunt or aid in hunting in some way.

You kind of have to wonder if maybe they're on the bleeding edge of chimp technology in some way like the one. Those are the ones who, if left alone for a few hundred thousand years, might evolve to select anatomical traits that favor throwing, and you know, modify objects from their environment to make their throwing more effective.

to tune in Thursday to see what happens. In the meantime, we'll remind you that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a science podcast that publishes core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed On Mondays, we do listener mail, on Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster fact episode, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to discuss a weird movie on Weird House Cinema.