Wild chimpanzees are natural drummers who tap out rhythms on their surroundings, according to a recent study.
A large international collaboration between researchers in Europe, Africa and America concluded that chimpanzees drum with deliberate rhythm and timing, hitting tree trunks and roots as they travel and hoot. These findings give scientists insights into the possible origins of human musicality.
“Humans are intrinsically rhythmic creatures,” the study’s senior author, Prof Catherine Hobaiter of the University of St Andrews, told BBC Science Focus. “We have rhythm in our music and in our dance and in our song, but also in our conversations – and it’s a human universal, so it might be part of our evolutionary heritage.”
To explore where this rhythm comes from, the researchers turned to our closest living relatives.
“Both language and music are skills that do not fossilise, so you can’t pick them up in a rock and understand how they evolved in time,” the study’s lead author, Vesta Eleuteri of the University of Vienna, told BBC Science Focus. “You need to look at other species, to study the building blocks that may have preceded language or music evolution.”
Hobaiter added: “This shows us that the building blocks of rhythm were probably present long before humans were human.”
The study, recently published in Current Biology, is a culmination of decades of painstaking observation and analysis, involving 371 recorded bouts of chimpanzee drumming across 11 wild chimp communities in West and East Africa.
“People might not realise how long it takes to collect this data,” said Hobaiter. “Don’t get me wrong, the forest is my happy place. But in some cases, we’re talking about decades of research from each site – so maybe a century or more, cumulatively.”
All these recordings were collected, encoded and analysed. Researchers measured the duration of each drumming bout, the gaps between each hit, and the variability of the drummed rhythms, concluding that the rhythms were non-random.
But not only can chimpanzees drum out a beat – individual chimps have their own unique styles. There are even regional differences between the drumming of different chimp communities and subspecies.
For example, chimpanzees in West Africa tended to drum with regularly spaced hits, but they did so quickly. Meanwhile, East African chimps mixed up their rhythms with shorter and longer hits.
The scientists don’t know why this is – and Hobaiter said it’s driving them “a little bit crazy” – but Eleuteri suggested it might be because of social or cultural differences between the different chimpanzee subspecies.
Hobaiter said these rhythmic differences were “a really good call to arms that every chimp matters” when it comes to conservation.
“If we recognise that each individual population or subspecies have these differences between them, suddenly conserving each and every group becomes really important," she said. "Because if you lose a group of chimpanzees, you potentially lose a unique cultural, musical or rhythmic heritage that you can never get back.”
Read more:
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- Chimpanzees observed digging wells after being taught how by an immigrant female
About our experts
Vesta Eleuteri is a PhD student at the University of Vienna's Department of Behavioural and Cognitive Biology, currently studying how African elephants communicate. She previously researched chimpanzee buttress drumming at the University of St Andrews and philosophy at the University of Rome, La Sapienza.
Catherine Hobaiter is a professor at the University of St Andrews' School of Psychology and Neuroscience. She has worked with primates in Uganda and across Africa for 15 years. Hobaiter's research group, the Wild Minds Lab, concentrates on long-term field studies of communication and cognition in wild African apes. She continues to spend around half the year in the field, and recently established new field sites in Uganda (the Bugoma Primate Conservation Project) and in Guinea (the Moyen-Bafing Chimpanzee Project).
