hammer or hand?

Slashdot-linked study finds that primate brains consider tools to be a part of the body. So it turns out what they teach in martial arts has a basis in evolutionary biology.

The findings "fairly clearly show that monkey tool use involves the incorporation of tools into the body schema, literally as extensions of the body," says Dietrich Stout, an archaeologist specializing in tool use at University College London. Scott Frey, a neuroscientist at the University of Oregon, Eugene, says that in humans, this ability to represent tools in the brain, combined with a capacity for innovation, "was no doubt a fundamental step in the development of technology."

Neat story for use in early world civ weeks.