A new study has revealed that wild chimpanzees drum with rhythm—and that their drumming shares some surprising similarities with human music.
Published in the journal Current Biology, the research also shows that chimpanzees living on opposite sides of Africa have distinct drumming styles.
Chimpanzees drum on the large, flat buttress roots of rainforest trees using their hands and feet, sending messages that can travel over a kilometre through the dense forest.
Professor Catherine Hobaiter, from the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at St Andrews and co-lead of the study, explains: 'Making music is a fundamental part of what it means to be human—but we don’t know for how long we have been making music.
'Showing that chimpanzees share some of the fundamental properties of human musical rhythm in their drumming is an exciting step in understanding when and how we evolved this skill. Our findings suggest that our ability to drum rhythmically may have existed long before we were human.'
The study brought together researchers from St Andrews, the University of Vienna, and Sapienza University of Rome. Building on earlier work showing each chimpanzee has a unique drumming style, this study asked: do different chimpanzee groups drum differently? And is their drumming rhythmic, like ours?
The team collected an extraordinary dataset—over a century’s worth of combined work—recording chimpanzee drumming from 11 communities across six populations in both eastern and western Africa. And what they found was fascinating.
PhD student Vesta Eleuteri, who led the research, explains: 'Chimpanzees from West Africa—like humans—often drum isochronously, which is when sounds occur one after another with the exact same amount of time between them: like the ticking of a clock, or the kick drum in electronic music. Chimpanzees from East Africa prefer to alternate short and long intervals in their drumming.'
Interestingly, the team also found that West African chimpanzees drum faster than their eastern counterparts.
The researchers believe their findings add an important piece to the puzzle of how musicality evolved. Next, they plan to explore how chimpanzees coordinate their hands and feet to create these rhythms, how drumming influences social interactions, and how different trees help shape the unique sounds of their drumming.
