In 2018, a chimpanzee mother named Soukki did something researchers had never filmed before: she poked a stick into an ant colony, grabbed her baby daughter Saïsaï, and led her to the ready-to-use tool. Saïsaï pulled it out and happily ate the ants stuck to it. That quiet moment, captured by a hidden camera in Senegal, is helping scientists understand something remarkable — that chimpanzees may actually teach their children.
The discovery builds on a famous moment from 1960, when Jane Goodall watched a chimp called David Greybeard snap off a twig to fish for termites. That one observation rewrote what we thought animals could do. Now, more than six decades later, researchers following in her footsteps are finding that tool use isn't just learned by watching — it's actively passed from one chimp to another.
Andreu Sánchez-Megías, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Barcelona and the Jane Goodall Institute Spain, led the new study published in Frontiers in Psychology. His team studied wild western chimpanzees at Dindefelo, a savanna site in Senegal. They analyzed nearly 15 hours of footage from camera traps set up between 2017 and 2025 at 14 spots where the chimps were known to use tools — fishing for algae, army ants, and fungus-growing termites.
Altogether, the researchers recorded 33 instances of chimpanzees handing tools to one another, plus four times they shared fruit. Most of the transfers — 58% — happened during the tricky skill of ant dipping, while 30% took place while fishing for algae and 12% during termite fishing. The givers were usually adults, most often mothers. And the lucky recipients? Mostly infants.
Soukki wasn't the only teacher caught on camera. In 2021, a mother named Féré gathered three baobab fruits. A young male then picked one up and pounded it against a rocky outcrop, guiding Fotti's hand to the fruit before stepping back. The footage clearly shows young Fotti watching carefully, then trying the pounding himself — and eventually succeeding.
Of all the transfers, 30% went straight from mother to offspring, and nearly all were voluntary, donated at the youngster's request. When tools were stolen outright instead, the unlucky owner sometimes hit the thief or grabbed the object back.
"Tool transfers thus appear to be a form of teaching, together with observation and supervised practice," said Sánchez-Megías. "It appears that mothers are the main models and teachers for young chimpanzees."
Teaching takes an active role from the teacher — and at Dindefelo, that role seems to belong to mothers who patiently hand their children the very tools they need to grow up skilled, clever, and free.