But neither study demonstrates the kind of sophisticated copying typical of humans and which demarcates humans from other animals, Pagel says.
Crossed swords, beehive or Vienna marks, Nippon, Sèvres marks, RS Prussia, Augustus Rex and AR marks have been targeted as sophisticated copies.
In analysing how to apply 3D printing to chemistry, Cronin wondered in the first instance if the essentially passive idea of a highly sophisticated form of copying from a software blueprint could be made more dynamic.
Described as the closest thing to teleportation, the most sophisticated 3D printers can copy an object in one location and reproduce it millimetre for millimetre in another.
Most digital textbooks also only license the first owner, and sophisticated software ensures that copies cannot be passed around.
One possible explanation for the latter trend is that the more sophisticated mechanisms of DNA copying and repair of higher organisms lead to lower average amino-acid substitution rates.
The overlap also fits with archaeological data on the kind of tools that each used, suggesting a period when Neanderthals began to copy the more sophisticated tool-making of the new migrants.
Adam Segal of the Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank, points out that the sensors that America's soldiers use are no longer secret technology, but they use them in sophisticated ways that rivals cannot copy easily.There is another reason to take the current "techno-nationalism", as Mr Bhidé calls it, with a grain of salt.
However, like some other Asian governments, Taiwan has worried that operating advanced flat-panel manufacturing facilities across the Straits would provide a shortcut for Chinese companies to copy or steal sophisticated technology.
