A video of a mother chimpanzee teaching their kids on how to use tools to get food is going around the internet.
Stephanie Musgrave of Washington Unversity said that wild chimpanzees are exceptional tool users. However up until now there has been no concrete evidence that chimps teach their young how to use tools.
Musgrave and her colleagues found this out after capturing a video of the way chimps use their tools in termite mounds.
Science Daily reported mother chimps teach their young by transferring termite-fishing probes to their offspring. They added that chimpanzees create fishing probes that has a brush-tip design.
Musgrave stressed that sharing these tools is a way of teaching younger chimps the material to create the fishing probe.
Crickette Sanz, one of the researchers, explained that humans take for granted the importance of sharing information in learning complex abilities. According to the researcher, behavior evolution comes from things that are challenging to create on their own.
Musgrave also added that transferring tools reduces the mother's ability to forage for food but is beneficial for their children, because of the knowledge they learned from their parents. She explained that identifying how wild animals teach other is difficult, because they need to find out the benefits of the knowledge transfer to the parent and children.
The website Laboratory Equipment explained that the transfer was initiated by the offspring chimp, that mimicked his mother for 30 seconds to learn the activity. They explained that it was the video that proved that chimps really do pass knowledge from parent to offspring.
Sanz explained that the video became the catalyst to expand their research to other chimp communities. The researcher stressed that they also managed to observe a group of young chimps learning how to use these tools without human intervention.
This is not the first time the researchers gave evidence on the way chimpanzees live. Last year, they showed evidence of drank chimps in the wild.
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