Sex differences found in chimpanzee learning

Young female chimpanzees learn certain hunting and gathering skills from their mothers much faster than their male counterparts -- who prefer to spend their time playing, researchers said on Wednesday.

In a study of wild chimps from the Gombe National Park in Tanzania, researchers found distinct sex-based differences in the way the young animals developed the skill of fishing for termites, despite their mothers paying equal attention to both sexes and being as tolerant with males as females.

"To our knowledge, this is the first systematic evidence of a difference between the sexes in the learning or imitation of a tool-use technique in wild chimpanzees," researchers Elizabeth Lonsdorf, Lynn Eberly and Anne Pusey wrote in the Nature scientific journal.

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"A similar disparity in the ability of young males and females to learn skills has been demonstrated in human children and may be indicative of different learning processes."

In a four-year-long field study, Lonsdorf and her colleagues observed 14 young chimps and their mothers engaged in "fishing" in termite mounds with tools they make out of nearby vegetation.

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They found that although the mothers had the same amount of social interaction with both sexes, and were equally patient with males and females, the young females learnt the skill as much as 27 months earlier than their male siblings.

The young females also chose to spend more time watching and learning from their mothers, while the males spent significantly more time playing, the study found.

The researchers said their results -- although based only on a small group -- may indicate that sex-based learning differences may date back at least to the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans.