The wild chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, fish for termites with flexible tools that they make out of vegetation, inserting them into the termite mound and then extracting and eating the termites that cling to the tool¹. Tools may be used in different ways by different chimpanzee communities according to the local chimpanzee culture². Here we describe the results of a four-year longitudinal field study in which we investigated how this cultural behaviour is learned by the community's offspring. We find that there are distinct sex-based differences, akin to those found in human children, in the way in which young chimpanzees develop their termite-fishing skills.

1. Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, University of Minnesota, Saint Paul, Minnesota 55108, USA
2. Division of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, USA

Correspondence to: Elizabeth V. Lonsdorf¹ Email: elonsdorf@lpzoo.org

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