Scientists: Chimpanzees retain the ability to learn even into adulthood

Scientists have discovered that chimpanzees can learn and master new skills not only in childhood, but also in adulthood.

An article published in the journal PLoS Biology stated: “Our study showed that chimpanzees mastered the skills of using tools to obtain hard-to-find food even in their adult years, confirming the hypothesis that the development of a large brain in the common ancestors of great apes and humans allowed them to retain the ability to learn throughout their adult lives.” The first two decades of life.

This conclusion was reached by a team of African and European primatologists led by Roman Wittig, senior researcher at the Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, while observing the lives of 70 chimpanzees living in the Tay National Reserve in Côte d'Ivoire. Scientists monitored through cameras the daily life of monkeys in the reserve during the years 2013-2020.

Primate scientists said local chimpanzees often use various work tools, including sticks, to extract insects from tree trunks and obtain other hard-to-reach food. Scientists were interested in how primates learned this skill and how their skills in using work tools changed over time. Guided by this idea, the researchers followed some individual chimpanzees with these tools.

When the scientists began to analyze the video recordings they had collected, they found that the monkeys' ability to operate tools in different situations changed not only during childhood and adolescence (the first six years of a chimpanzee's life), but during at least the first 15 years of their life. During this time, primates gradually learned how to hold tools properly in their arms and handle them more effectively when obtaining food.

Such studies have shown that chimpanzees retain the ability to learn even into adulthood, which makes them similar to humans and distinguishes them from other mammals that lose this ability after childhood. According to primatologists, this indicates that similar skill, which later became one of the driving mechanisms of human technological evolution, was also a feature of the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, in addition to other creatures.