In the Goualougo Triangle of the Republic of Congo, chimpanzees harvest termites using a two-tool system. First, they manufacture a thick, sturdy puncturing stick from a specific plant species and drive it into the soil to breach the outer wall of a subterranean termite nest. Then they switch to a separate fishing probe—thinner, more flexible, often with the tip deliberately frayed by pulling it through their teeth to create a brush-like end—and insert it through the access tunnel they’ve just made. Termites bite the frayed fibers, the chimpanzee withdraws the probe, and eats them off the bristled end. The whole operation requires selecting the right raw materials, manufacturing two distinct tools in the correct sequence, and knowing how to modify one of them to improve its efficiency. It is, by any reasonable definition, a technology.
Nine hundred kilometers east, at Gombe in Tanzania, chimpanzees also fish for termites. But they use a single tool—a simple probe stripped of leaves, inserted directly into exposed holes in the mound—and they don’t puncture, don’t use tool sets, and don’t fringe the tips. Same species. Same resource. Same basic objective. Completely different technique. And when researchers compared these two populations in a study published in PNAS, they found that in Goualougo—where the task is more complex—mothers were significantly more likely to actively share tools with their offspring and facilitate learning, something that barely happens at Gombe, where the task is simple enough that young chimps figure it out by watching.
That’s not instinct varying by region. That’s culture. And the chimpanzee evidence for culture is, at this point, about as close to settled as anything in behavioral ecology gets.
The 1999 paper that changed the field
The landmark study was Andrew Whiten’s 1999 paper in Nature, which synthesized data from the seven longest-running chimpanzee field sites across Africa—151 combined years of observation. The analysis identified 39 distinct behavioral patterns, including tool use, grooming styles, and courtship displays, that were customary or habitual in some communities but entirely absent in others, even when ecological and genetic explanations had been ruled out. The behavioral repertoire of each community was itself distinctive—not just a few isolated differences but a combinatorial profile of dozens of traditions that, taken together, made each population culturally unique.
That’s worth sitting with. Before 1999, “culture” in the biological sciences was essentially reserved for humans. Other animals had “traditions” or “behavioral variation” or, if you were being generous, “proto-culture.” Whiten’s paper didn’t just add chimpanzees to the list of species with cultural variation—it showed that the scope and combinatorial complexity of that variation was without parallel in any non-human species. Not one tradition. Not three. Thirty-nine, distributed across communities in patterns that looked less like random variation and more like the kind of between-group differences you’d see comparing human societies.
The paper used what’s called the “method of exclusion”—if a behavior is present in one community and absent in a neighboring community with access to the same raw materials, the same prey species, and similar genetic backgrounds, and if that behavior is transmitted socially rather than reinvented independently, then the most parsimonious explanation is cultural transmission. It’s not a perfect methodology—proving a negative (that ecology doesn’t explain the difference) is always harder than proving a positive—but it was rigorous enough to shift the consensus.
The tool traditions themselves
The catalog of chimpanzee tool behaviors now documented across Africa is staggeringly diverse, and the geographic specificity of individual techniques is what makes the cultural interpretation so compelling.
Nut cracking with stone or wooden hammers is practiced by chimpanzee populations in West Africa—in Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone—but is completely absent in East and Central African populations, despite the availability of suitable nuts and hard surfaces. The Taï Forest chimpanzees in Côte d’Ivoire select stone hammers of appropriate weight for the hardness of the nut species being cracked, transport hammers to anvil sites they remember from previous visits (sometimes carrying them over a kilometer through the forest), and teach the technique to juveniles through years of observation and practice. Young chimps at Taï spend roughly four to five years learning to crack Coula nuts and seven years to crack the harder Panda nuts. That’s an apprenticeship, not a light-switch moment.
Ant dipping—using a stick to harvest driver ants or safari ants from their nests—varies in technique across populations in ways that map onto geography rather than ecology. Some populations use short sticks and eat the ants directly off the tool with their lips. Others use long sticks, wait for a mass of ants to swarm up the tool, then sweep them off with a single hand motion into their mouth. The technique choice correlates with community membership, not with the ant species or the physical properties of the nest. When researchers at the Taï site compared neighboring communities separated by only a few kilometers, they found that the communities used different lengths of ant-dipping tools and different techniques—despite inhabiting functionally identical habitat with the same ant species available. The difference was social, not ecological.
Spear hunting is one of the most striking recent discoveries. At Fongoli in southeastern Senegal, Jill Pruetz documented chimpanzees fashioning wooden spears from branches—stripping side branches, sharpening the tip with their teeth—and thrusting them into tree cavities to stab bushbabies, small nocturnal primates that shelter in hollow branches during the day. This has not been observed at any other site. It’s a behavior that involves tool manufacture, planning (they modify the spear before approaching the tree, not after), and lethal predatory intent. Female and juvenile chimps at Fongoli do this more frequently than adult males, which inverts the usual pattern of male-dominated hunting in chimpanzees and suggests the spear technique may be an equalizer—a technology that compensates for the strength advantage that adult males have in manual capture.
Honey dipping—using sticks to extract honey from beehives—shows variation across the entire species range. Central African populations at some sites use complex multi-tool sets (a pounder to break open the hive, a collector to extract the honey), while West African populations that eat honey frequently often don’t use tools at all. A 2021 study in Guinea-Bissau documented honey-dipping tools for the first time in the westernmost chimpanzee populations, adding new data points to a behavioral map that’s still being filled in. The variation suggests that honey-dipping technology has been invented and elaborated independently in different populations, rather than spreading from a single origin—which is convergent cultural evolution, a concept that makes the human parallel even more interesting.
Why this isn’t just “smart animals being smart”
The critical distinction between culture and individual intelligence is social transmission—behaviors that are learned from others, maintained within a group over generations, and resistant to disruption by individual innovation. If every chimpanzee independently figured out how to crack nuts, that would be intelligence. What makes it culture is that the technique is passed from mother to offspring through years of observation and practice, maintained within populations even when individuals migrate between groups, and differentiated between neighboring communities in ways that can’t be explained by the environment.
The conformity data is particularly striking. In a series of experiments by Andrew Whiten and colleagues, researchers introduced two different techniques for solving the same food-extraction problem into separate captive groups by training a single high-ranking female in each group. The technique spread through each group via social learning. But here’s the part that matters: some individuals in each group independently discovered the alternative technique—the one that had been seeded in the other group—and then abandoned it in favor of the locally dominant method. They conformed. They had a working solution, discovered a different working solution, and reverted to the one everyone else was using. That’s not problem-solving. That’s peer pressure. That’s culture.
In the wild, the same conformity pattern has been documented with migrating females. When a female chimpanzee transfers from one community to another—which is the normal dispersal pattern—she adopts the tool traditions of her new community, even if she was proficient in a different technique at her birth community. William McGrew, one of the founding figures of chimpanzee cultural primatology, pointed out the thought experiment: imagine a female from Gombe transferring to Goualougo. If she persisted in fishing for termites the Gombe way—single probe, no puncturing stick—she’d fail, because the Goualougo termite nests require the puncturing step she never learned. She’d have to adopt the local technology or go hungry. The technology is the community’s intellectual property, and you either learn it or you don’t eat.
What this tells us about early human culture
The reason chimpanzee tool traditions matter beyond primatology is that chimpanzees are one of our two closest living relatives (bonobos being the other), and the last common ancestor we shared lived roughly six to seven million years ago. The cultural capacity documented in living chimpanzees—multiple traditions, conformity bias, social transmission across generations, geographically specific tool-use techniques—represents either a shared ancestral trait or an independently evolved one. Either way, the implication is that the cognitive and social infrastructure for culture was present in the hominin lineage long before stone tools show up in the archaeological record around 3.3 million years ago.
The emerging field of “primate archaeology” is making this connection explicit. Researchers are applying the same archaeological methods used to study early human tool sites—analyzing raw material selection, tool morphology, wear patterns, and spatial distribution of discarded tools—to chimpanzee termite-fishing sites and nut-cracking stations. The Kasekela and Mitumba communities at Gombe, separated by just a few kilometers, produce termite-fishing tools that are measurably different in length and width, made from different selections of raw materials, even though both communities have access to the same plant species. That’s the kind of between-population variation in material culture that, if it showed up in a 2-million-year-old hominin site, would be published in Nature and generate a press cycle about “the origins of technology.”
It’s already happening. It’s just happening in chimpanzees, which makes it less glamorous and more informative.
We cover chimpanzee tool traditions—alongside whale dialects, corvid problem-solving, fish social learning, and the full breadth of non-human cultural transmission—across our Animal Culture & Knowledge course. If the spear-hunting bushbaby story made you rethink what “culture” means, the course goes considerably deeper.