Chimpanzees drum rhythmically
The results of a recent study suggest that making music could be older than mankind.
We humans share a crucial building block of musicality with chimpanzees: rhythmic drumming. A team from the University of Vienna, the University of St. Andrews and the Sapienza University of Rome has shown that chimpanzees also follow a rhythm when drumming and that individual groups even use different rhythms.
The team asked themselves whether chimpanzees are capable of drumming rhythmically like humans. To answer the question, they collected a globally unique new dataset of chimpanzee drumming from rainforests and savannah woodlands across Africa, with drums from eleven communities from six different populations in the east and west of the continent.
The results are increasingly blurring the boundaries. The ability to synchronize and collectively make a form of music has long been regarded in music anthropology as a criterion for distinguishing between humans and animals.
Original publication:
Vesta Eleuteri, Catherine Hobaiter, Andrea Ravignani et al: Chimpanzee drumming shows rhythmicity and subspecies variation. In Current Biology.DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.04.019
