Chimpanzees learn to crack nuts faster than humans

16 Dec 2019

Early this year, Christophe Boesch and coworkers released a paper describing their observations on how fast chimpanzees and humans learn to crack nuts. They collected data on human foragers from the Mbendjele group, and chimpanzees of the Taï forest, watching how children and juvenile chimpanzees learn from other individuals, the extent that older individuals “teach” by intentionally directing their behavior toward the learners, and measuring the rate at which individuals can get panda nuts out of their shells.

The method that each group uses to crack nuts is very similar.

Most people’s intuition probably would suggest that humans would learn how to crack nuts faster than chimpanzees. Boesch and coworkers found the opposite: Chimpanzees learn much faster than humans, and chimpanzees attain adult proficiency at much younger ages than humans do.

. . .

This is just an incredible figure. Taï chimpanzee adults and Mbendjele adults both end up with a similar pace of nutcracking – the humans average a bit higher but the variation among human and chimpanzee adults overlaps completely.

More:
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/chimpanzees/toolmaking/nutcracking-learning-boesch-2019.html