Better Than A Monkey?

A friend of mine sent me an email today with the following story:

“My wife saw an ad on one of her websites for a kitchen clock that she liked.  It had been priced at 50 dollars and was reduced to 9.99 as clearance. 

She read the reviews and many of them faulted the product as it came unassembled and had no instructions. They had to return it not knowing how to assemble it. 

She ordered one any way. 

It arrived a large circle brightly colored with the two hands and a second hand in a cellophane wrapper. 

The mechanism was attached to the back of the clock face. 

So the assembly, for which there were no instructions, was to push the three hands onto the spindle which was on the face of the clock. 

For that someone needed instructions! 

Perhaps they had never seen a clock before and only used sundials.

And these people vote too”.

*****************************************************************************************

This little tale moved my mind immediately to a story I had just read in The Week.

In the science section of the current issue there was an article about a discovery about a specific colony of capuchin monkeys.

The discovery was that 700 years ago the monkeys began using specially shaped rocks to crack open thick shelled nuts; they put the nut on a flat rock and hit it with their tool and got the contents out of the broken shell.

The discovery was further that the monkeys stored their tools in the vicinity of the trees that produced the nuts.

The article finally pointed out that the scientists think that the humans in the area learned how to crack the nuts by watching the monkeys.

I’m not kidding.