Captive chimpanzees learn new grunts from neighbours to refer to foods — the first evidence of such behaviour in non-humans, according to a study.

To see whether chimps (pictured) show flexibility in the calls they use to refer to everyday objects, Simon Townsend at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and his team compared the grunts of seven chimps that were moved from a safari park in the Netherlands to join six chimps in a UK zoo. A year after the move, the Dutch chimps referred to apples with a high-pitched call, in contrast to the deep-timbred grunts of the UK chimps. But after three years, the Dutch chimps had adopted their neighbours' calls.

Credit: Florian Moellers/RZSS

The findings suggest that social learning of referential words in humans could have a longer evolutionary history than was thought.

Curr. Biol. http://doi.org/zzd (2015)