Chimpanzees give youngsters the tools to learn tricky techniques

Two-thirds of a century after Jane Goodall observed “David Greybeard” break off a twig to fashion a fishing rod for termites, researchers following in her footsteps have found that adult chimpanzees in Senegal literally hand youngsters the tools for learning.

Darwin noted in 1871 that chimpanzees use stones to crack nuts, striking a blow to human hubris. Over the 20th century, a select few animals as diverse as octopuses and parrots have been observed making and using tools.

But in agreement with Darwin’s observation, tool use seems to have evolved more frequently among monkeys and apes. For example, chimpanzees are known to manufacture leaf sponges to soak up liquids, shape sticks to fish for algae and sharpen simple spears for hunting.

“Here we show that receiving food and tools from experienced individuals, which we call food or tool transfer, may help chimpanzees learn to use technology to extract foods that are difficult to access,” said Andreu Sánchez-Megías, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Barcelona and the Jane Goodall Institute Spain in Senegal, who is the first author of a new study in Frontiers in Psychology.

“Tool transfers thus appear to be a form of teaching, together with observation and supervised practice. It appears that mothers are the main models and teachers for young chimpanzees in this manner.”

Share and share alike

Sánchez-Megías and colleagues from the Jane Goodall Institute Spain in Senegal and the University of Barcelona studied wild western chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) at the savanna site of Dindefelo, Senegal. They analyzed almost 15 hours of footage from camera traps taken between 2017 and 2025. The traps had been deliberately installed at 14 spots where chimpanzees were known to use tools, including fishing for algae, army ants and fungus-growing termites.

They also gathered 30 minutes of footage from cameras at 11 sites where chimpanzees habitually carry baobab fruit, which they pound against stationary stone “anvils.” While termite fishing and ant dipping occur in communities of all four chimpanzee subspecies across Africa, fishing for algae and ‘baobab pounding’ are known only from western chimpanzees in Senegal, Mali and Guinea.

Overall, the authors recorded 33 instances of tool transfer from one chimpanzee to another, as well as four instances in which chimpanzees handed over fruit. The researchers compared the behavior before and after these donations by the initial “possessors” and the “recipients” to whom they handed the objects.

Of the 33 transfers observed, 58% happened in the context of ant dipping, while 30% and 12% took place during algae fishing and termite fishing, respectively. Most (58%) of the original owners were adults, especially females. In contrast, the largest percentage of recipients (42%) were infants rather than youngsters or adults.

The majority of objects were handed over from one relative to another, most frequently, 30%, from mother to offspring. All but one of the voluntary transfers seemed to happen at the recipient’s initiative. In some cases, tools and fruit were stolen outright, in which case the unlucky possessor might hit the thief to retaliate or grab the object back.

Unique footage of newly discovered behavior

Importantly, the authors presented two fascinating videos—respectively of ant dipping and baobab pounding—in their study, which for the first time allow other scientists and the general public to watch how such seemingly deliberate “technological transfers” proceed among Dindefelo chimpanzees.

In the first, taken in 2018, mother Soukki deliberately inserted a dipping stick into an ant colony, grabbed her baby daughter Saïsaï and led it to the ready-to-be-extracted tool. Saïsaï then pulled it from the nest and went on to eat the ants sticking to it.

In the second video, from 2021, mother Féré collected three fruits. An unidentified juvenile male “teacher” then approached and proceeded to pick up one fruit and repeatedly pound it against a rocky outcrop. He then guided Fotti’s hand to the fruit once. The video clearly shows how Fotti attentively observed the juvenile’s movements and proceeded to try his hand at pounding for himself—eventually with success.

The authors found that the majority of tool transfers took place from skilled to inexperienced individuals, including mother-offspring pairs and other relatives.

“Teaching is one of the strategies that chimpanzees use to transfer information and skills between individuals. It requires an active role from the teacher, who must modify their behavior to facilitate the transmission of information to the learner, and this is why teaching is thought to have evolved to transfer information that is too complex to be acquired through simpler mechanisms, such as individual or observational learning,” summarized Sánchez-Megías.

“One question that needs to be answered is the extent to which teaching contributes to the transmission of technological behaviors in great apes. Other questions are whether more complex behaviors require more teaching, and whether the individuals that receive more teaching ultimately become better teachers themselves,” said Professor R. Adriana Hernandez-Aguilar, the study’s senior author and research co-director of the Jane Goodall Institute Spain, as well as Serra Hunter Professor at the University of Barcelona.

Who’s behind this story?

Sadie Harley

BSc Life Sciences & Ecology. Microbiology lab background with pharmaceutical news experience in oil, gas, and renewable industries.

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Robert Egan

Bachelor’s in mathematical biology, Master’s in creative writing. Well-traveled with unique perspectives on science and language.

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