Tool-Using Wild Chimps

This is a video of wild chimps using stone tools to crack open nut shells so they can get at the nutmeats inside. Most of the chimps have a baby sitting next to them, learning about the reward to be had after crushing the nut with a rock.

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An adult chimpanzee in Bossou, Guinea uses hammer and anvil stones to crack nuts as younger individuals look on. From Haslam et al., 2009. Before 1859 the idea that humans lived alongside the mammoths, ground sloths, and saber-toothed cats of the not-too-distant past was almost heretical. Not…
Stones excavated from a forest in the Ivory Coast. They are 4,300 years old and have use patterns consistent with what is seen in modern chimpanzee sites. People like to believe they are somehow more special than animals, that we are set apart from other animals in some mysterious way. For quite…
Chimps are known to make a variety of tools to aid their quest for food, including fishing sticks to probe for termites, hammers to crack nuts and even spears to impale bushbabies. But a taste for honey has driven one group of chimps in Gabon's Loango National Park to take tool-making to a new…
You don't have to be particularly intelligent to use tools - many animals do so, including some insects. But it takes a uniquely intelligent animal to be able to combine different tools to solve a problem. We can do it, the great apes can do it, and now the New Caledonian crow joins our exclusive…

Good one! Primate use of tools! Looks like they're visual learners. Could you find the one of the chimpanzees using sticks to poke out termites? We love that one.
cheers

I am thouroughly impressed by any animal using tools-gorillas & chimps(etc.),vultures & crows(etc.)dolphins,otters - and the way they "teach" their young. My handfed baby Lovebirds have learned to slide open their cage feeding doors abit to "bang" as I refill their cups just as their mother does in eagar anticipation. I have an open door policy so its' not a sign of trying to escape but a repetition of what their mother had done with cages in in the same room. I even named'em: banger #1,#2,&#3. Just amazing and abit irritating!

By Diane in Ohio (not verified) on 21 Feb 2007 #permalink