The abilities of chimpanzees are increasingly surprising. They are not only able to choose rocks to peel nuts or choose a more reliable branch to use to cross a river. It has been just discovered that they do multi use tools to pick honey from hives.

 

These breakthroughs achieved by the team of researcher Christophe Boesch, director of Primatology Department of Max Planck Institute, in Germany, are results of years of research work with chimpanzees in the wild in Africa.

 

The institute has been doing research at Tai National Park for 27 years and since February 2005 the activities were extended to Loango National Park, in Gabon. The objective is to improve the observation of cultural evolution and tools used by the primates’ communities.

 

In two years of research they found 614 potential tools produced by chimpanzees in 45 different locations, the majority in sites where there were bee hives. It was a great surprise when they observed that the chimpanzees were able to build and use five different types of sticks to locate hives and get honey out of them.

 

As it had been described at magazine New Scientist, some of those sticks were very thin and straight, in order to explore the land and find the ones which were buried; others had a grind point in order to break the entrance of the hive when it was found; others were too thin in order to pull the walls of the hive to find the honey.

Once they found the hive and the honey, they use sticks with a lot of points in order to collect as much honey they can with a single movement. Primatologists found, in many cases, these tools near an invaded hive, which suggests that they use different kinds of tools one after the other. Some had more than one use: at one side it was used to test the wall and at the other, to collect the honey. This means that the tools had multiple uses, something that had never been observed before in other species, only in humans.

 

It was also discovered that the chimpanzees had produced the sticks. They did not use the branches they randomly found. Each part was manipulated to accomplish a function. Scientists also published their conclusions in Journal of Human Evolution and consider that this demands a great planning capacity, on each phase of the process, when it is compared with the common action of open a nut with a rock.

 

Another ability of the chimpanzees is their imagination capacity, because they can suppose what the hive buried looks like. Primatologist Boesch commented: “Mental capacities needed to accomplish this mission are the same which one supposes that had been used by the first human beings at rock age.”

The primatologist also believes that specifically the desire of collecting honey successfully was one of pressure factors that could have helped the development of intelligence in our species. Until today, honey is one of the most appreciated foods by some hunters and collectors human groups in Africa.