Photo by Margaux Ansel on Unsplash
Photo by Margaux Ansel on Unsplash

Chimpanzees need teachers to learn tool-use

Embargoed until: Publicly released:
Peer-reviewed: This work was reviewed and scrutinised by relevant independent experts.

Animals: This is a study based on research on whole animals.

Humans may not be the only primates who need lessons to learn sophisticated survival skills. Researchers provided a group of chimpanzees in the Nimba Mountains of Guinea with piles of nuts alongside stone tools used by a neighbouring chimpanzee population to crack them open. Despite demonstrating curiosity and experimentation, the Nimba group failed to figure out how to crack open the nuts, suggesting that chimps need to be taught how to use tools by their peers. Researchers say their long-running experiment shows that chimpanzees have ‘cumulative culture’, reliant on complex social-learning behaviours that were previously considered an exclusively human trait.

Journal/conference: Nature Human Behaviour

Link to research (DOI): 10.1038/s41562-021-01272-9

Organisation/s: University of Zurich

Funder: Research was supported by grants from the Lucie Burgers Foundation for Comparative Behaviour Research (the Netherlands), Gates Cambridge Trust (Cambridge, UK), Homerton College and Newnham College (Cambridge, UK) to K.K. and by MEXT (grant nos.12002009, 16002001, 20002001, 24000001 and 16H06283) to T.M. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

Media release

From: Springer Nature

Anthropology: Tool use may be socially learned in wild chimpanzees

A group of wild chimpanzees did not crack nuts when provided with stone tools to do so even though a separate, nearby community of chimpanzees crack nuts with tools, according to a long-running field study published in Nature Human Behaviour. This suggests that the use of tools is not easily picked up by wild chimpanzees, and may suggest that this behaviour has to be socially learned.

Humans learn to use tools and other skills from watching each other. Through this form of social learning, human culture has become increasingly complex. However, whether this type of cumulative culture is unique to humans is an ongoing debate. Previous experiments with captive apes have found that they begin to use tools without being taught, but captive apes observe humans using tools and may learn this behaviour from them.

In a long-running field experiment, Kathelijne Koops and colleagues provided a wild chimpanzee community in Seringbara, Guinea, with the exact tools that some nearby chimpanzee communities use to crack nuts. They also provided the chimpanzees with nuts, and filmed the results using camera traps. The authors observed that the chimpanzees were interested in the tools at first, but did not use them to crack nuts, and gradually lost interest over several months. However, a separate chimpanzee community in Bossou, Guinea — only six kilometres away — do use tools to crack nuts.

These findings provide further insight into the nature of chimpanzee culture. Nut cracking by chimpanzees is considered to be a cultural behaviour that is only practised by certain chimpanzee communities. These experiments suggest that this part of chimpanzee culture is not readily adopted by other chimpanzees, even when they are given the tools. The authors suggest that chimpanzee culture, much like human culture, may have developed through learning from those within their social groups.

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