抄録
One of the important characteristics of human tool-use is that tools are used for social purposes in conjunction with technological uses. The analysis of social use of hunting tools among contemporary African hunter-gatherer societies shows: 1) the owner of a tool is the one who makes it; 2) the owner of the animal is the owner of the tool used for killing it; 3) tools are frequently exchanged, or borrowed and lent, which involves social manipulation of ownership and sharing of the hunted meat; 4) The meat owner shares the meat, obligatorily to the participants according to the role they play in the hunt, and voluntarily to other band members and visitors.
Thus in hunter-gatherer societies, tools serve as excellent means for social manipulation. This may shed some light on the question of evolution of human intellectual capacity, and integrate seemingly contrastive ecological and social hypotheses concerning the factors for intellectual evolution; the former emphasizing the importance of tool-use for manipulating the environment, and the latter of social manipulation of inter-individual relationships.
The lending of hunting tools can be regarded as indirect, delayed participation of the owner in cooperative hunting. The obligatory meat sharing is, therefore, performed according to the system in which sharing is prescribed by the preceding cooperation in hunting. Human hunter-gatherers are unique in that they integrate cooperative hunting and meat sharing into a single system of “hunting -sharing complex”. While non-human primates, chimpanzees in particular, show both cooperative hunting and meat sharing, these appear to be separate events, and are not integrated into a single system.
