For capuchin monkeys at Brazil’s Serra da Capivara National Park, tool use is a tradition going back millennia: A new study finds that these primates have used stone tools to process their food for the past 3,000 years, making it the oldest non-human site of its kind outside of Africa.

The site, described today in Nature Ecology & Evolution, contains layers of rounded stone cobbles that capuchins in the area produced over time to crack open seeds and nuts. Other non-human tool sites have been documented in and out of Africa; the oldest one known, a chimpanzee site in Côte d'Ivoire, is more than 4,000 years old. But Serra da Capivara’s tools alone show long-term variation, a milestone for