ArticleBiology letters2019
Chimpanzees use tree species with a resonant timbre for accumulative stone throwing.
Article in Biology letters, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Sticks and Stones: Hand Preference and Grip in Wild Chimpanzee Tool-Use.American journal of biological anthropology · 2026Article
- Valuing Behavioral By-Products: Evolutionary Significance of Neutrally Drifting and Exaptive Cultures in Primates.American journal of primatology · 2026Review
- Stone-assisted drumming in Western chimpanzees and its implications for communication and cultural transmission.Biology letters · 2025Article
- Selectivity in Buttress Drumming Tree Properties Among Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) of the Waibira Community in Budongo Forest, Uganda.American journal of primatology · 2025Article
- What we know and don't know about great ape cultural communication in the wild.American journal of primatology · 2025Review
- Chimpanzees employ context-specific behavioral strategies within fission-fusion societies.Primates; journal of primatology · 2024Article
- Individual preferences for sound tool design in a parrot.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Innovative multi-material tool use in the pant-hoot display of a chimpanzee.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- To drum or not to drum: Selectivity in tree buttress drumming by chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) in the Nimba Mountains, Guinea.American journal of primatology · 2022Article
- Sociality predicts orangutan vocal phenotype.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
- Inter-community behavioural variation confirmed through indirect methods in four neighbouring chimpanzee communities in Cantanhez NP, Guinea-Bissau.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Spontaneous (minimal) ritual in non-human great apes?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Review
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Animals use tools for communication relatively rarely compared to tool use for extractive foraging. We investigated the tool-use behaviour accumulative stone throwing (AST) in wild chimpanzees, who regularly throw rocks at trees, producing impact sounds and resulting in the aggregations of rocks. The function of AST remains unknown but appears to be communication-related. We conducted field experiments to test whether impact sounds produced by throwing rocks at trees varied according to the tree's properties. Specifically, we compared impact sounds of AST and non-AST tree species. We measured three acoustic descriptors related to intrinsic timbre quality, and found that AST tree species produced impact sounds that were less damped, with spectral energy concentrated at lower frequencies compared to non-AST tree species. Buttress roots in particular produced timbres with low-frequency energy (low spectral centroid) and slower signal onset (longer attack time). In summary, chimpanzees use tree species capable of producing more resonant sounds for AST compared to other tree species available.
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