Wild Chimps Learn to Use New Tools for the First Time and Teach Others

Chimps are some of the smartest animals on the planet and now, scientists have found out something else that they're good at. Researchers have discovered that chimps can adopt new behaviors and transmit them socially from one individual to another within a wild chimpanzee community.

"Researchers have been fascinated for decades by the differences in behavior between chimpanzee communities; some use tools some don't, some use different tools for the same job," said Catherine Hobaiter, one of the researchers, in a news release. "These behavioral variations have been described as 'cultural,' which in human terms would mean they spread when one individual learns from another, but in most cases they're long established and it's hard to know how they originally spread within a group."

In this case, the scientists found that the chimps learned how to make moss sponges. Chimps regularly use leaf sponges which they then dip in water to drink from, but in this case the researchers watched two novel variants of the leaf sponge: the moss sponge and leaf sponge re-use.

The researchers watched as Nick, a 29-year-old alpha male chimpanzee, made a sponge made of moss while being watched by Nambi, a dominant adult female. Over the course of six days, a further seven individuals made and used moss sponges. Six of the chimps had watched the behavior before adopting it themselves. This, in particular, showed that the chimps were learning from one another.

"This study tells us that chimpanzee culture changes over time, little by little, by building on previous knowledge found within the community," said Thibaud Gruber, one of the researchers. "This is probably how our early ancestors' cultures also changed over time. In this respect, this is a great example of how studying chimpanzee culture can help us model the evolution of human culture. Nevertheless, something must have subsequently happened in our evolution that caused a qualitative shift in what we could transmit, rendering our culture much more complex than anything found in wild apes. Understanding this qualitative jump in our evolutionary history is what we need to investigate now."

The findings are published in the journal PLOS Biology.