DEAR ABBY: You said in your column that you once heard an anthropologist say that "two things distinguish men from apes: our opposable thumb and our ability to invent tools."
Whoever that anthropologist was, he or she must have been years out of date. All primates have opposable thumbs, from the lemurs to the apes (in fact, many apes have FOUR opposable thumbs -- one on each hand and one on each foot). The ability to invent tools was once thought to be a uniquely human characteristic, until 1960. At that time, Jane Goodall observed wild chimpanzees making "tools" out of branches by stripping the leaves and breaking them to a proper size. These tools are made to "fish" for termites in the narrow tunnels of termite mounds, so they must be the proper thickness and free of leaves.
When she telegraphed this discovery to her sponsor, the famous anthropologist, Dr. Louis Leakey, he sent back the reply, "We must now redefine tools, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as human." Nobody would deny that we are different from chimpanzees and other apes, but the more we learn about them, the more we find that in many respects, we are not as different as perhaps we would like to think. -- TIM SUSMAN, STAFF SCIENTIST, THE JANE GOODALL INSTITUTE'S CENTER FOR PRIMATE STUDIES, ST. PAUL, MINN.
DEAR MR. SUSMAN: Thank you for enlightening me. When Miss Goodall discovered that chimpanzees are closer to humans than originally thought, she also made a monkey out of me.