Those apparently random games are turning out to be something far more serious: a hidden engine of cultural change that could help explain how both apes and humans built traditions, tools and social rules over time.
Young chimps aren’t just copying the adults
A new field study from Ngogo, in Uganda’s Kibale National Park, tracks how immature chimpanzees use and invent tools. The research team, led by scientists from the University of Montreal with colleagues from Aarhus, Yale and Toronto, followed 36 young chimps for 15 months between 2013 and 2018.
They recorded 67 clear episodes where these youngsters used objects: twigs, branches, moss, stones, leaves. Nearly half of those episodes – around 49% – were classed as “atypical” compared with adult behaviour in the same community.
Atypical, in this context, means: not what adults normally do, not mere clumsy attempts to imitate them.
Instead of simply copying, the young chimps were remixing. They tried new gestures, new combinations of objects, and new purposes for known behaviours. Many of these actions looked experimental rather than strictly goal-driven, as if the chimps were feeling their way toward possibilities.
Crucially, this experimentation happened in a relaxed social bubble. Adults tolerated a lot of fumbling and play with objects. Failed attempts carried little cost. That freedom appears to give youngsters room to step outside group norms without being punished or chased away.
The study site at Ngogo
Ngogo is home to one of the largest known chimpanzee communities, with dozens of adults and a busy cohort of infants and juveniles. Researchers there can watch individuals grow up over many years, tracking both social life and technical skills like tool use.
This long-term perspective matters. Behaviour that looks like random play in a single afternoon can, over months and years, become the seed of a stable habit – and sometimes a tradition copied by others.
Three striking innovations from very young chimps
Among all the unusual behaviours, the team highlighted three cases that clearly counted as full innovations: spontaneous, effective, and not documented among adults at Ngogo.
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- Moss sponge for drinking: A six-year-old female collected a clump of moss, pressed it into water and squeezed it into her mouth. Adults in the group make “leaf sponges”, carefully folding leaves to soak up water. The moss version used the material’s natural absorbency and was faster to assemble.
- Carrying a log like a baby: A one-year-old female was seen cradling and carrying a small tree trunk as though it were an infant. This “doll play” has been reported in other chimp communities but had never been seen at Ngogo before.
- Repurposed leaf-clipping signal: A young male tore leaves in the distinctive “leaf-clipping” manner usually used by adults to get attention in sexual or social contexts. Instead, he used it to ask his mother for a ride; she responded straight away.
Each of these cases shows a different flavour of innovation. The moss sponge tweaks an existing tool. Doll play takes a familiar social pattern – mothering – and applies it to an object. The leaf-clipping case flips the function of a known signal to meet a new need.
Innovation, in these chimps, often comes not from inventing from scratch, but from bending old behaviours to new goals.
Interestingly, the moss sponge did not spread through the group, despite being at least as efficient as the adult method. That gap between invention and adoption is a central puzzle in animal culture. A clever idea can flare up in a single mind, then vanish if nobody else pays attention.
Who are the “high explorers”?
The team wanted to know why some youngsters innovate more than others. They built an “exploration index” with five factors:
- How often each chimp used objects
- How many different objects they tried
- The share of their actions that were atypical
- How early in life object use appeared
- How long each individual was observed
Nine chimps – five females and four males – stood out with much higher scores than their peers. Researchers dubbed them “high explorers”. These individuals used objects more frequently, in more varied ways, and with a higher rate of unusual actions.
Two patterns emerged clearly:
| Factor | Effect on exploration |
|---|---|
| Sex | Females, on average, explored more and showed a broader range of object use. |
| Mother’s experience | Offspring of mothers who had already raised other infants scored higher. |
Experienced mothers tended to be more tolerant, allowing youngsters to handle tools nearby without interference. That tolerance appears to encourage risky or odd-looking experiments that might otherwise be cut short.
Childhood as a cultural testing ground
The findings give fresh weight to a long-standing idea: childhood is not just a training phase, but a key engine of cultural change. By granting youngsters more leeway and fewer consequences for mistakes, social groups create a kind of behavioural laboratory.
Childhood becomes a safe space for breaking rules, where most “failures” simply look like play.
This relates directly to debates in evolutionary anthropology about how culture develops in both apes and humans. Two concepts are especially relevant.
Two models of how culture spreads
Researchers often contrast two zones of learning:
- Latent solutions zone (ZLS): Some behaviours can be reinvented individually, without close copying. A chimp might independently figure out how to crack nuts with stones, given enough time and suitable objects.
- Zone of proximal acquisition (ZPA): Opportunities created by others shape when and how new skills appear. Watching adults, siblings or peers handle objects nudges youngsters toward certain solutions rather than others.
The Ngogo data fit both ideas. The moss sponge could be seen as a latent solution: no one had to show the young female how to squeeze moss. At the same time, she clearly drew inspiration from watching adults make leaf sponges.
The repurposed leaf-clipping is even more explicitly social. The young male knew leaf-clipping was a powerful attention-grabber because he had seen adults use it. He then applied that social “tool” to a new purpose – requesting transport from his mother.
From chimp traditions to human culture
Chimpanzee traditions do not build over generations in the way human technologies do. Our species is unusual in its ability to stack innovations, refine them and pass them on in ever more complex forms.
Yet the Ngogo study suggests a shared foundation. Both chimps and humans rely heavily on long childhoods filled with play, curiosity and frequent social contact. In both cases, the youngest group members generate a lot of behavioural variation.
Most of these quirks go nowhere. A new trick might be seen once and never again. For a behaviour to become tradition, others must notice it, copy it and find it useful enough to keep doing. Status, timing and social relationships can all tilt that balance.
Anthropologists suspect that early humans might have looked a lot like Ngogo youngsters in this respect. Children trying out new ways of cutting, carrying or signalling may have produced the raw material from which later, more formalised techniques emerged.
What “innovation” actually means in animal behaviour
In everyday language, innovation often sounds glamorous, even planned. In animal research, the term is more modest and precise. An innovative act is simply a new behaviour, or a new use of an old behaviour, that appears to solve some problem or serve a clear function.
That function might be practical, like extracting food more efficiently, or social, like attracting attention in a fresh way. Many such acts arise from play: repeated low-stakes experiments with objects, social partners or body movements.
From a scientist’s perspective, three questions help decide whether something counts as innovation:
- Is the behaviour new for this community?
- Does it seem to work for the individual?
- Can it be explained purely as a clumsy attempt at copying, or does it show some twist or recombination?
The Ngogo cases tick those boxes, even when they appear playful or whimsical to human eyes.
Why this matters for how we treat young animals
These findings have practical implications. In sanctuaries, zoos and conservation projects, juveniles are often seen primarily as learners who must acquire adult skills. The Ngogo work suggests they also act as innovators who add behavioural diversity to their groups.
Giving young animals varied, safe access to objects and social partners may encourage exactly the kind of experimentation that keeps captive groups mentally stimulated. At the same time, researchers need to think carefully before dismissing odd or rare behaviours as “noise” in their data. Those oddities might be the early spark of tomorrow’s tradition.
For humans, the parallel is uncomfortable but clear. When children improvise strange uses for toys, kitchen tools or digital apps, they may be doing something very similar to those young chimps with their moss and leaf signals: testing the edges of what is possible, one small, playful step at a time.
Originally posted 2026-02-13 00:40:14.