In the humid rainforest of Uganda, researchers watched 28 wild chimpanzees for over two years—1,000 hours of patient observation—and documented something that overturns decades of thinking about great ape intelligence: 69 culturally learned behaviors, nearly doubling what scientists thought possible. The work, published in iScience, comes from the Budongo Conservation Field Station and reveals that chimpanzee culture is far richer and more intricate than experts realized, woven not just through flashy skills like termite-fishing but through the everyday choreography of survival.
The revelation matters because it reshapes how we understand what culture means. For generations, researchers studying chimpanzees followed a strict rule: a behavior only counted as "cultural" if it couldn't be explained by genes or the environment alone. This threshold made sense methodologically—it drew a clear line between learned tradition and instinct. But it also meant scientists were looking only for the remarkable: tool use, novel foraging tricks, the kinds of behaviors that made headlines. When Jane Goodall first documented chimpanzees using sticks to fish for termites at Gombe National Park in Tanzania, that was culture. By contrast, watching a mother strip leaves or groom a companion seemed too ordinary to track, too everyday to matter.
The Budongo team, led by Nora Slania at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, took a different approach. Instead of assuming what counted as cultural, they studied peering—the intense, attentive watching one animal does of another—as a window into what chimpanzees actually learn from one another. Over 1,000 hours of observation, they recorded 366 instances of peering, and when they traced what the chimpanzees were watching, they found 69 distinct behaviors. Only two had been flagged as cultural in earlier research. The rest were what any observer might miss: exploring, playing, grooming, feeding. About 60 percent involved the delicate work of identifying, processing, and eating food—fruits, leaves, plant materials that sustain life in the forest.
This shift in focus reveals something profound about culture itself. As Dr. Caroline Schuppli, senior author of the study, puts it: in humans, we don't require behaviors to be remarkable to count them as cultural. The way we speak, dress, or eat are all culture. We inherit these patterns socially every day without thinking them extraordinary. Yet animals have long been held to stricter standards—asked to prove they possess not just behaviors, but exceptional ones. The Budongo findings suggest that when researchers apply more human-like standards, the cultural landscape of other species expands dramatically.
The young chimpanzees in the study paid especially close attention during their developmental years, the precise time when they needed to master survival skills. They watched experienced individuals—often their mothers—and other group members whenever the chance arose, absorbing the knowledge encoded in daily practice. This is learning as embodied, social, and foundational: the transmission not of tricks or innovations, but of what it means to be a chimpanzee in this particular forest, in this particular community.
The implications ripple outward. If chimpanzees possess a cultural repertoire nearly twice as broad as previously thought, what might we discover in other species? The work invites a recalibration of how we measure intelligence and culture across the animal kingdom—a recognition that richness often hides in the ordinary.