Chimpanzees do more than use tools. Wild adults pass tools to younger relatives, helping them learn how to fish for ants, algae, and termites.
Researchers recorded 33 instances of tool transfer and three attempts in 15 hours of video footage collected from 2017 to 2025 at Senegal’s Dindefelo Community Nature Reserve. The observations came through the Jane Goodall Institute Spain in Senegal and show behavior that fits a simple form of teaching.
Chimpanzees already have an impressive tool kit: leaf or moss sponges, sticks for fishing, and crafted spears. The new observations add a social step to that picture, showing adults giving younger animals access to tools that help extract food from places they cannot reach easily.
Tools Passed During Foraging
Ant dipping accounted for 58 percent of the transfers, followed by algae fishing at 30 percent and termite fishing at 12 percent. The figures connect tool sharing to practical lessons rather than casual object exchange — the chimpanzees pass tools when a useful skill is in play.
Adults held the original tools in 58 percent of cases, and most of those adults were female. Infants made up 42 percent of recipients, while about 30 percent of all transfers occurred between mothers and their offspring.
In all but one case, the recipient initiated the voluntary transfer. That detail matters because it suggests young chimpanzees were not passive props in an adult demonstration; they sought access to the tools, and adults responded.
One example involved Soukki and her daughter Saïsaï. Soukki led Saïsaï to a tool, after which the daughter pulled ants from an ant nest — a small exchange with the structure of a lesson.
Andreu Sánchez-Megías, a graduate student at the University of Barcelona and the Jane Goodall Institute Spain in Senegal, said, “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.”
He added, “Tool transfers thus appear to be a form of teaching, together with observation and supervised practice.” The phrasing is careful, but the behavior is hard to dismiss as simple generosity when it repeatedly appears during difficult foraging tasks.
Teaching Without a Classroom
The footage also captured four instances of baobab fruit transfers involving Féré and her infant son Fotti. In one example, a juvenile male pounded a fruit against rocks, then guided Fotti’s hand to a fruit to help him open it.
That episode broadens the pattern beyond fishing tools. The transfer involved food, a worked object, and physical guidance, giving the infant a chance to participate in the action instead of merely watching it happen.
Elliot Howard-Spink of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany described teaching events as “quite rare and difficult to study because only so many learning attempts are needed until an individual learns a behaviour.” The 15 hours of footage therefore offer a useful window into behavior that can vanish once a young chimpanzee masters the task.
Howard-Spink also said, “Showing across many forms of tool use that these tool transfers are indicative of a very simple form of teaching is very cool and nice.” The finding covers ant dipping, algae fishing, termite fishing, and baobab fruit handling — not one isolated trick dressed up as a breakthrough.
R. Adriana Hernandez-Aguilar at the University of Barcelona, Spain, and Andrew Whiten at the University of St Andrews, UK, are also connected to the work. Whiten said the observation “fits the criteria for teaching used in animal behaviour research – that the behaviour benefits the pupil’s opportunities to learn, and is done despite having a cost to the teacher.”
That cost is the point. An adult that gives up a tool, pauses to guide a youngster, or leads it toward a usable object spends time and loses an immediate foraging advantage.
Louis Leakey once put the larger question bluntly: “Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man,’ or accept chimpanzees as humans.” These observations do not settle that philosophical argument, but they make one old human distinction less comfortable: teaching technology is not ours alone.
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