Wild chimpanzee mothers hand tools to infants, footage reveals teaching in action

In the savanna woodlands of Dindefelo, Senegal, adult chimpanzees have been filmed deliberately handing tools and food to young members of their community, apparently so that the youngsters can practice difficult foraging techniques for themselves. A new observational study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, documents dozens of these transfers and argues that they may function as a form of teaching, in which experienced individuals actively shape how inexperienced ones acquire complex technological skills.

“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 PhD candidate at the University of Barcelona and the Jane Goodall Institute Spain in Senegal, and the study’s first author. “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.”

The research follows a long scientific tradition. Charles Darwin noted in 1871 that chimpanzees use stones to crack nuts, an observation that struck a blow to human hubris at the time. Over the twentieth century, a select few animals as diverse as octopuses and parrots have been observed making and using tools. But in agreement with Darwin’s early account, tool use appears to have evolved more frequently among monkeys and apes. Chimpanzees, in particular, are known to manufacture leaf sponges to soak up liquids, shape sticks to fish for algae, and sharpen simple spears for hunting.

Two-thirds of a century after Jane Goodall observed the chimpanzee she named David Greybeard break off a twig to fashion a fishing rod for termites, researchers following in her footsteps have now found that adult chimpanzees in Senegal literally hand youngsters the tools for learning. The new study focuses on wild western chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) at Dindefelo, a savanna site monitored by the Jane Goodall Institute Spain.

Sánchez-Megías and colleagues from the Jane Goodall Institute Spain in Senegal and the University of Barcelona 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. The team 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 fruit was handed over. The researchers compared the behavior of both the initial possessors and the recipients before and after these donations. Of the 33 transfers observed, 58 percent happened in the context of ant dipping, while 30 percent and 12 percent took place during algae fishing and termite fishing, respectively. Most of the original owners, 58 percent, were adults, especially females. In contrast, the greatest percentage of recipients, 42 percent, were infants rather than youngsters or adults. The majority of objects were handed over from one relative to another, most frequently, in 30 percent of cases, by a mother to her offspring.

One striking pattern was the direction of initiative. Not every exchange was voluntary, however. In some cases, tools and fruit were stolen outright, and the unlucky possessor might hit the thief to retaliate or grab the object back. The authors found that the majority of tool transfers took place from skilled to inexperienced individuals, including mother-offspring pairs and other relatives.

Importantly, the authors presented two videos, respectively of ant dipping and baobab pounding, which for the first time allow other scientists and the general public to watch how such seemingly deliberate technological transfers proceed in the Dindefelo chimpanzees. In the first video, taken in 2018, a mother named Soukki deliberately inserted a dipping stick into an ant colony, grabbed her baby daughter Saïsaï, and led her to the ready-to-be-extracted tool. Saïsaï then pulled the stick from the nest and went on to eat the ants sticking to it. In the second video, from 2021, a mother named Féré collected three fruits. An unidentified juvenile male then approached, picked up one fruit, and repeatedly pounded it against a rocky outcrop, before guiding Fotti’s hand to it once. The footage shows clearly how Fotti attentively observed the juvenile’s movements and proceeded to try his hand at pounding for himself, eventually with success.

“Teaching is one of the strategies that chimpanzees use to transfer information and skills between individuals,” Sánchez-Megías summarized. “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.” On this view, the handovers recorded at Dindefelo are not incidental acts of tolerance but behaviorally modified responses that place a difficult skill within a youngster’s reach.

The study is explicitly observational, based on camera-trap footage of a single community at one site, and the authors themselves frame the interpretation cautiously: tool transfers “may” help learning and “appear” to be a form of teaching rather than a demonstrated causal effect on skill acquisition. “One question that needs to be answered is the extent to which teaching contributes to the transmission of technological behaviors in great apes,” said Prof R. Adriana Hernandez-Aguilar, the study’s senior author, research co-director of the Jane Goodall Institute Spain, and Serra Hunter Professor at the University of Barcelona. “Other questions are whether more complex behaviors require more teaching, and whether the individuals that receive more teaching ultimately become better teachers themselves.” The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. For now, the footage from Dindefelo offers a rare, direct window into how one of our closest living relatives may pass difficult technologies from one generation to the next, one handed-over stick and one pounded baobab fruit at a time.

Subject of Research: Observational study of tool and fruit transfers among wild western chimpanzees at Dindefelo, Senegal, and their possible role in teaching foraging techniques

Article Title: Chimpanzees give youngsters the tools to learn tricky techniques

Article References: Chimpanzees give youngsters the tools to learn tricky techniques. Original publication (Bibliographic details unavailable.)

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: chimpanzees, tool use, teaching, western chimpanzees, Senegal, Dindefelo, animal behavior, ant dipping, termite fishing, baobab pounding, social learning, primatology