As anyone who has spent time with a child knows, even very young people like to point out objects to others. However, this behavior was previously thought to occur only in our species. Now researchers say they have found a case of a chimpanzee showing its mother a leaf. “He doesn’t offer it for food. She doesn’t want her mom to do anything. He just wants them to see it together and be like, ‘Oh cool, cool!’” said University of York professor Katie Slocombe and co-author of the study. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Slocombe and his colleagues note that even close relatives of humans, such as the great apes, were thought to gesture to objects for specific purposes. “Sometimes when they groom themselves in this community of chimpanzees, they carve out a certain spot on their body … and that shows, ‘I want you to groom me here,’” Slocombe said. “If they have their hands open for something, it means ‘Give me this.’ While studying the Ngogo community of chimpanzees in Uganda’s Kibale National Park, Slocombe and his colleagues recorded video footage of an adult female, named Fiona, grooming a leaf—a common behavior in which chimpanzees pluck leaves, they look at it and look at it and pet it. But then Fiona did something unusual: she held the card up to her mother, Sutherland, who was sitting next to her. When Sutherland only lowered her eyes, Fiona pushed the card further – possibly, the team suggests, because she didn’t see her mother’s response. “She makes about three separate movements, each time bringing it closer and closer to her mother’s face,” Slocombe said. Once Sutherland moved both her eyes and head towards the foliage, Fiona pulled the leaf away and continued to groom it. To explore possible explanations, the researchers examined 84 video clips of chimpanzees in the communities of Ngogo and Kanyawara grooming leaves near at least one other person. While a leaf was often observed simultaneously by the chimpanzee grooming it and a viewer, they were not recorded eating the foliage. Only five of the 58 clips of a chimpanzee’s behavior both before and after leaf grooming showed them subsequently grooming or playing with another chimpanzee. The result, the team says, is that Fiona was likely not offering food or seeking other activity. Instead, she probably just wanted to show her mother the card. Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you to the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Professor Frans de Waal, a primary at Emory University who was not involved in the work, described the observation as remarkable. “This is not the first time we have seen a suggestion that chimpanzees voluntarily indicate information to others – I have described such incidents myself – or that they might teach others new information, but this is now the best-documented case,” he said. . “It means that chimpanzees, and perhaps other apes, perceive that other people gather information the way they do and are willing to share information with others without any prompting or reward or selfish ends.” While Slocombe acknowledged that the team has only documented one instance of the behavior, she hopes that experts can now look for similar examples or even find them in previously collected footage. But, he said, questions remain. “Our last common ancestor with chimpanzees probably did it occasionally, as chimpanzees do now,” he said. “So what we need to understand is what the selection pressure was to increase our motivation to do it more.”
