Young chimps reveal how play drives evolution

Young chimps appear to be more innovative than scientists previously thought. They are capable of inventing tools and improving on those that adults use.

Such abilities could help us better appreciate the role of children in the evolution of all cultures, including our own.

That’s the striking message from a new study led by anthropologist Sorin Bădescu at the Université de Montréal.

Bădescu observed young wild chimpanzees in Uganda long enough to see something we often overlook in our own species: little ones are not just learners, they’re inventors.

And if that’s true for chimps, it strengthens a growing idea in human evolution too – that children may have been the spark for many of the cultural twists adults later adopted.

Young minds drive innovation

“This paper is about the evolution of culture in humans, using chimps as a model of comparison,” Bădescu said. “The take-home message is that children could be more important figures in cultural evolution than previously thought.”

Youngsters, he argues, get a rare developmental window when the rules are looser. “At their stage of development kids are allowed to be creative and to explore.”

“They can experiment with tools and objects and this leads to new and innovative ways of using them. It introduces variation into the repertoire of skills that adults can pick up on, and that’s how culture evolves,” he added.

In other words, culture doesn’t have to start in the heads of dominant adults. It can bubble up from playful, curious juveniles – as long as the group lets them try things.

Lessons from Uganda’s forest

The study took place at Ngogo in Uganda’s Kibale National Park, home to one of the largest known chimp communities.

Over 15 months spread across 2013–2014 and 2018, the team followed 36 infant and juvenile chimps. They logged 67 different ways the animals handled or used objects. Nearly half of those actions didn’t match what adults usually do.

Some of the most charming examples were fully original. One youngster carried a tree stump around like a baby.

Another young chimp used a tuft of moss as a sponge to soak up water, a clever way to drink without getting down into a puddle. A third clipped leaves to signal that it wanted to be carried.

These weren’t random flukes. They showed the kids taking known materials and pushing them into new social or practical roles.

“We don’t often think of kids as being the innovators of technology, but they can indeed be important,” Bădescu said. “For anyone interested in how culture is created, regardless of their academic disciplines, these observations and results should be quite interesting.”

Measuring curiosity in chimps

To move beyond anecdotes, the team created an “exploration index” for each young chimp. It combined how often the animals used objects, how many different uses they tried, and how unusual those uses were.

Nine individuals scored especially high – the bold experimenters of the group. Interestingly, females and youngsters whose mothers already had several offspring tended to score higher.

That hints that social safety nets matter: when you have experienced, tolerant mothers and older siblings around, you can afford to try more new things.

The youngsters didn’t only invent new behaviors – they also tweaked adult ones. They probed honeycombs and termite mounds with sticks, like grownups, but sometimes in new contexts.

They performed “leaf grooming,” a kind of pretend grooming of others using leaves, echoing adult social behavior but in their own style.

Almost all of the atypical actions – 94 percent – were either new versions of adult techniques or adult-style behaviors used in fresh contexts.

Chimp play fuels evolution

“These findings suggest that immatures generate novelty at the margins of species-typical behavior yet vary in their propensity to innovate,” the authors wrote.

That line matters because it describes exactly where cultural change tends to start: at the edges, in low-stakes moments, with individuals who are more exploratory than average.

“A permissive social environment for object play may be key to the developmental pathways of innovation, providing a generative context for behavioral variation on which social learning and selection can act.”

“If retained and transmitted, even rare innovations by immatures could contribute to the accumulation of cultural complexity.”

Chimps mirror human evolution

The parallel with humans is hard to miss. Human children also spend years in protected, playful, hyper-curious modes before heavy adult responsibilities kick in.

That long runway may not just be for learning existing tools – it may be for creating new ones.

Bădescu’s chimp data gives evolutionary grounding to the hunch many educators, parents, and anthropologists share: culture grows because young minds are allowed to stretch.

So, the next time we describe children as “just playing,” it might be more accurate to say they are stress-testing the future.

And, as these Ugandan chimps show, adults are often the ones who get to benefit from that early, messy, inventive work.

The study is published in the journal Scientific Reports.

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