Wild Chimp Culture Caught On Camera

The researchers revealed that, we have captured special tools that is used by wild population of chimps and this believes to be the major evidence that a new culture is evolving.

The team of researchers captured the moment at a field station in Uganda. We observed that chimps were busy in making new type of leaf-sponge, which they might used for drinking, researchers stated.

However, this can be seen that this new behavior may possible spread all over the chimps group.

The Study is published in the PLOS Biology journal.

“The chimps make a leaf-sponge, which they dip into ponds and then suck the water out,” Lead researcher Dr Catherine Hobaiter, from the University of St Andrews stated.

She further stated in her interview with BBC News, “We were so lucky that we captured the two news tools made by these chimps in order to drink water from ponds.”

One of our fellow researchers sees a dominant male chimpanzee, which used moss instead of leaf to make that sponge. We captured these moments in our cameras. I saw this behavior seems spreading among individual to individual, Dr Hobaiter said.

“Principally, if you saw it done, you learned how to do it, and if you didn’t you didn’t,” Dr Catherine Hobaiter told.

We believe that it’s a king of social learning that wasn’t happened in the wild before. “We have had that in captivity and indications in the wild, but this was the final little piece of the puzzle,” researchers say.

Furthermore, the researchers’ team from Anglia Ruskin University and the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland analyzed the video in order to find out accurately how the new tool developed and spread.

This is actually a fact that new behaviors were “variations of the old, eminent sponge-making technique” proposed that chimp culture changes slowly, structuring on formerly attained information in order to develop an existing tool repertoire, Dr Thibaud Gruber from the University of Neuchatel stated.

He further told BBC News that, “With admiration to humans, our results strongly hold up the idea that the last common ancestors of chimps and humans could learn cultural behaviors from each other, in a similar way.”

Moreover, “We already knew that the chimps are enough able to do that,” Dr Susanne Schultz from the University of Manchester said.