Chimpanzees have a long, fascinating history and are famous for their intelligence, but a groundbreaking new study reveals that they may be more like engineers than we ever imagined. Researchers have discovered that chimpanzees living in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park carefully select plant materials to craft termite-fishing tools, choosing those with just the right flexibility to navigate the tricky tunnels of termite mounds.
This fascinating finding, published in iScience, sheds new light on our closest relatives’ level of technical understanding. Termites are a valuable food source for chimpanzees, providing essential nutrients. But extracting them from deep within their burrows is no simple task. Thin, flexible tools work best, as they can bend and adapt to the winding tunnels inside termite mounds.
To test whether chimpanzees deliberately choose materials based on flexibility, lead researcher Alejandra Pascual-Garrido and her team used a portable mechanical tester to measure the force required to bend different plants. The results were striking—plant species rejected by chimpanzees were found to be 175% more rigid than those they preferred for their tools. Even among plants growing in the same area, the ones frequently used by chimpanzees were more pliable than nearby unused ones.
“This finding has important implications for understanding how humans might have evolved their remarkable tool-using abilities,” explains Adam van Casteren, a specialist in biomechanics and evolutionary biology at the Department of Human Origins, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
Intriguingly, chimpanzees in other parts of Africa, even thousands of kilometers away, appear to favor the same plant species, such as species of Grewia, for their tools. This suggests that their preference for flexible materials is not random, but based on an intuitive understanding of how materials behave—a kind of “folk physics.”
Chimpanzees’ ability to assess the physical properties of materials raises exciting questions about how this knowledge is acquired and passed down through generations. Young chimpanzees may learn by closely observing their mothers’ techniques, much like human children do when picking up practical skills.
The implications extend beyond chimpanzees. Their ability to pick materials with precision hints at the evolutionary roots of human tool-making. “While perishable materials like wood rarely survive in the archaeological record, the mechanical principles behind effective tool construction and use remain constant across species and time,” says Adam van Casteren.
By studying how chimpanzees solve engineering challenges in the wild, scientists can piece together clues about how our early ancestors crafted their first tools. The next time you see a chimpanzee dipping a stick into a termite mound, remember—you’re watching an engineer at work.
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