Ancient Chimps or Tano Giants?

Tano Giant

Harry Trumbore’s sketch of the reportedly local hairy hominoid of Africa’s Gold Coast, the Tano Giant, which was seen using a cow skin as a cape to keep itself warm.

Breaking news from an international research team, led by archaeologist Julio Mercader of the University of Calgary, Canada, announces that chimpanzees may have been using stone “hammers” as long as 4,300 years ago, in the West African country, the Ivory Coast.

What if the owner of the tools too large for human hands was the Tano Giant, a huge unknown hominid known from the country today called Ghana, with the last sightings around 1911?

Côte d’Ivoire in International French, officially the République de Côte d’Ivoire, or, translated into English, the Ivory Coast, is a country in West Africa that borders Ghana to the east.

The Ivory Coast hammers were apparently used to crack nuts, and the Canadian team indicates that a “chimpanzee stone age” may have begun in ancient times. The earliest reports of stone tool use by chimpanzees in West Africa date to the writings of Portuguese explorers in the 1600s.

The scientists found that the stones were about the size of cantaloupes with patterns of wear indicating use to crack nuts. The rocks would have been too large for human hands, but about right for the larger, stronger hands of chimpanzees, the University of Calgary researchers said.

But no fossils, no subfossils, no bones were found. They are guessing about the owners of the “ancient hammers.” What if they belonged to something else that was allegedly there? What if the stones were being used by unknown hominoids that enjoyed nuts? (The nuts, we are told, are not liked by humans.)

Source for the “ancient chimpanzee theory”: Randolph E. Schmid, “Ancient Chimps May Have Used Hammers”, February 12, 2007.

Source for more on the Tano Giant: The Field Guide to Bigfoot and Other Mystery Primates (NY: Anomalist Books, 2006; pages 98-99).