Do Chimpanzees Use Tools? Termite Fishing and Nut Cracking

Jane Goodall’s 1960 discovery

In November 1960, a young researcher named Jane Goodall was watching chimpanzees at Gombe, on the shore of Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania. She saw a male she called David Greybeard push grass stems into a termite mound, pull them out and eat the termites clinging to them. She later saw chimpanzees strip the leaves from twigs to make suitable probes.

At the time, tool making was widely seen as something that set humans apart from other animals. Goodall’s mentor, the paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, recognized that the observation forced scientists to rethink what made humans unique. Since then, tool use has been recorded in nearly every chimpanzee population studied.

What tools do chimpanzees use?

Chimpanzees use tools above all to get food that is otherwise out of reach. The most common types are:

Some communities use a series of tools in a fixed order. In the Goualougo Triangle of the Republic of the Congo, chimpanzees first use a stout stick to puncture an underground termite nest and then insert a thinner, frayed probe to fish out the termites.

How do chimpanzees crack nuts?

Nut cracking is one of the most complex tool skills known in any wild animal. A chimpanzee places a hard nut on an anvil, such as a flat stone or exposed root, and strikes it with a hammer of stone or wood. The nut must be placed carefully, and the force and angle of each blow adjusted, or the nut flies off or the kernel is smashed.

Nut cracking is common in the Taï Forest of Côte d’Ivoire and at Bossou in Guinea, but it has only been seen in West Africa. Chimpanzees in East Africa do not crack nuts, even in places where suitable nuts and stones are available, which is one of the strongest pieces of evidence for chimpanzee culture.

Archaeologists digging at Taï have found stone hammers with nut residues that are about 4,300 years old, showing that chimpanzees have been cracking nuts there for thousands of years.

Do chimpanzees hunt with spears?

At Fongoli, a savanna site in Senegal, researchers reported in 2007 that chimpanzees break off branches, strip them, sometimes sharpen the tips with their teeth, and jab them into tree hollows where galagos (bushbabies) sleep. Females and young chimpanzees did most of this tool-assisted hunting, which is unusual, since adult males do most hunting at other sites.

Chimpanzees also use objects as weapons and in displays. Males drag and throw branches during charging displays, and some West African communities repeatedly throw stones at particular trees, building up piles of rocks whose purpose is still debated.

How do chimpanzees learn to use tools?

Young chimpanzees learn mainly by watching their mothers, often from very close up, and then practicing. Infants play with sticks and stones long before they use them effectively. Termite fishing takes years to perfect, and nut cracking is usually only mastered at around three to five years of age, with skill continuing to improve after that.

Mothers rarely teach in an active way, but they tolerate their young taking tools and nuts, and at some sites mothers have been seen leaving or handing over good tools. In the Goualougo Triangle, some mothers share termite probes with their offspring.

Is chimpanzee tool use cultural?

Many scientists think so. In 1999, a team of researchers compared seven long-term study sites and identified 39 behaviors, including many tool uses, that were customary in some communities but absent in others, with no obvious ecological reason. Patterns like this, passed on by social learning, fit the definition of culture used by biologists.

The finding helped establish chimpanzees as one of the smartest animals and among the best tool users in the animal kingdom. Other examples, from crows to sea otters, are covered in our list of animals that use tools.

How does chimpanzee tool use compare with human tools?

Chimpanzee tools are simple: they are made by breaking, stripping or biting materials rather than by carefully shaping them, and chimpanzees do not deliberately knap sharp stone flakes. Still, they plan ahead, carry tools to where they need them, choose suitable materials and combine tools in sequence. These abilities give researchers clues about how tool use may have begun in our own early ancestors.