New research from a team of cognitive scientists and evolutionary biologists finds that chimpanzees drum rhythmically, using regular spacing between drum hits. Their results, publishing in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on May 9, show that eastern and western chimpanzees—two distinct subspecies—drum with distinguishable rhythms. The researchers say these findings suggest that the building blocks of human musicality arose in a common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans.
“Based on our previous work, we expected that western chimpanzees would use more hits and drum more quickly than eastern chimpanzees,” says lead author Vesta Eleuteri (@EleuteriVesta) of the University of Vienna, Austria. “But we didn’t expect to see such clear differences in rhythm or to find that their drumming rhythms shared such clear similarities with human music.”
Earlier studies showed that chimpanzees produce low-frequency sounds by drumming on buttress roots—large, wide roots that grow above the soil. The researchers suggest that the chimps use these percussive patterns to send information over both long and short distances.
“Our previous study showed that each chimpanzee has their own unique drumming style and that drumming helps to keep others in their group updated about where they are and what they’re doing—a sort of way to check in across the rainforest,” Eleuteri says. “What we didn’t know was whether chimpanzees living in different groups have different drumming styles and whether their drumming is rhythmic, like in human music.”
To find out, Eleuteri and her team, including senior authors Catherine Hobaiter of the University of St. Andrews in the UK and Andrea Ravignani of Sapienza University in Rome, teamed up with other chimpanzee researchers to study 371 drumming bouts in 11 chimpanzee communities, including six populations and two subspecies.
Chimpanzee groups drum with distinct rhythms, according to a new study published in the journal Current Biology. In the picture, a chimpanzee drumming. Photo Credits: Current Biology, Eleuteri et al.
After analyzing the drum patterns, they found that chimpanzees drum with rhythm and that the timing of their hits is non-random and often evenly spaced. Eastern and western subspecies also exhibited different drumming patterns; western chimpanzees used evenly spaced hits while eastern chimpanzees more often alternated between hits at shorter and longer time intervals. They also found that western chimpanzees hit their “drums” more, using a faster tempo, and integrated their drumming earlier in their pant-hoot vocalizations.
“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,” says Hobaiter. “Showing that chimpanzees share some of the fundamental properties of human musical rhythm in their drumming is a really 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.”
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This research was supported by funding from the European Union’s 8th Framework Programme, Horizon 2020, the Austrian Science Fund, the Swiss National Science Foundation, SNSF Eccellenza Professorial Fellowship, Homerton College, Newnham College, the A.H. Schultz Foundation, the Jane Goodall Institute Schweiz, MEXT, the Max Plank Society, the European Union ERC, TOHR, the Center for Music in the Brain, and the Danish National Research Foundation.
Bibliographic information:
Vesta Eleuteri, Jelle van der Werff, Wytse Wilhelm, Adrian Soldati, Catherine Crockford, Nisarg Desai, Pawel Fedurek, Maegan Fitzgerald, Kirsty E. Graham, Kathelijne Koops, Jill Pruetz, Liran Samuni, Katie Slocombe, Angela Stoeger, Michael L. Wilson, Roman M. Wittig, Klaus Zuberbühler, Henry D. Camara, Gnan Mamy, Andrea Ravignani, Catherine Hobaiter, “Chimpanzees drum rhythmically and with subspecies variation”, “Current Biology” (2025) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.04.019
An elephant shows an unusual banana peeling behavior: its self-taught banana peeling offers glimpse of elephants’ broader abilities; the study has been published in Current Biology
Elephants like to eat bananas, but they don’t usually peel them first in the way humans do. A new report in the journal Current Biology on April 10, however, shows that one very special Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) named Pang Pha picked up banana peeling all on her own while living at the Berlin Zoo. She reserves it for yellow-brown bananas, first breaking the banana before shaking out and collecting the pulp, leaving the thick peel behind.
Indian elephant bull in musth in Bandipur National Park. Picture by Yathin S Krishnappa, CC BY-SA 3.0
The female elephant most likely learned the unusual peeling behavior from watching her caretakers peel bananas for her, the study authors report. The findings in a single elephant show that elephants more broadly have special cognitive and manipulative abilities, they say.
“We discovered a very unique behavior,” said Michael Brecht (@BrechtLab) of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin’s Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience. “What makes Pang Pha’s banana peeling so unique is a combination of factors—skillfulness, speed, individuality, and the putatively human origin—rather than a single behavioral element.”
Like other elephants, Pha eats green or yellow bananas whole. She rejects brown bananas outright. But when it comes to yellow bananas spotted with brown—the kind one might reserve for banana bread—she eats after peeling them first.
Brecht and colleagues including Lena Kaufmann (@lena_v_kaufmann), also at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Andreas Ochs, Berlin Zoological Garden, made the discovery after learning from Pha’s caretakers about her unusual banana-peeling talent. At first, they were confused. They brought Pha nice yellow and green bananas, and she never peeled them.
“It was only when we understood that she peels only yellow-brown bananas that our project took off,” Brecht said.
When yellow-brown bananas are offered to a group of elephants, Pha changes her behavior, they report. She eats as many bananas as she can whole and then saves the last one to peel later.
Banana-peeling appears to be rare in elephants as far as anyone knows, and none of the other Berlin elephants engage in peeling. It’s not clear why Pha peels them. The researchers note, however, that she was hand raised by human caretakers in the Berlin Zoo. They never taught her to peel bananas, but they did feed her peeled bananas.
Based on this, the researchers suggest she acquired peeling through observational learning from humans. Earlier reports on African elephants suggest elephants can interpret human pointing gestures and classify people into ethnic groups, but complex human-derived manipulation behaviors, like banana-peeling, appear rather unique, according to the researchers. The findings in Pha nevertheless suggest that elephants overall have surprising cognitive abilities and impressive manipulative skill.
“Elephants have truly remarkable trunk skills and that their behavior is shaped by experience,” says Brecht.
The researchers find it surprising that Pha alone picked up on banana peeling. It leads them to wonder if such habits are normally passed on through elephant families. They’re now looking into other sophisticated trunk behaviors, such as tool use.
Woolly mammoths evolved smaller ears and woolier coats over the 700,000 years that they roamed the Siberian steppes; the study has been published in the journal Current Biology
A team of researchers compared the genomes of woolly mammoths with modern day elephants to find out what made woolly mammoths unique, both as individuals and as a species. The investigators report April 7 in the journal Current Biology that many of the woolly mammoth’s trademark features—including their woolly coats and large fat deposits—were already genetically encoded in the earliest woolly mammoths, but these and other traits became more defined over the species’ 700,000+ year existence. They also identified a gene with several mutations that may have been responsible for the woolly mammoth’s miniscule ears.
“We wanted to know what makes a mammoth a woolly mammoth,” says paleogeneticist and first author David Díez-del-Molino (@indianadiez) of the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm. “Woolly mammoths have some very characteristic morphological features, like their thick fur and small ears, that you obviously expect based on what frozen specimens look like, but there are also many other adaptations like fat metabolism and cold perception that are not so evident because they’re at the molecular level.”
To identify genes that were “highly evolved” in woolly mammoths— meaning they had accrued a large number of mutations—the team compared the genomes of 23 Siberian woolly mammoth with 28 modern-day Asian and African elephant genomes. Twenty-two of these woolly mammoths were relatively modern, having lived within the past 100,000 years, and sixteen of the genomes had not been previously sequenced. The twenty-third woolly mammoth genome belonged to one of the oldest known woolly mammoths, Chukochya, who lived approximately 700,000 years ago.
“Having the Chukochya genome allowed us to identify a number of genes that evolved during the lifespan of the woolly mammoth as a species,” says senior author Love Dalén (@love_dalen), professor of evolutionary genomics at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm. “This allows us to study evolution in real time, and we can say these specific mutations are unique to woolly mammoths, and they didn’t exist in its ancestors.”
Not surprisingly, many genes that were adaptive for woolly mammoths are related to living in cold environments. Some of these genes are shared by unrelated modern-day Arctic mammals.
“We found some highly evolved genes related to fat metabolism and storage that are also found in other Arctic species like reindeer and polar bears, which means there’s probably convergent evolution for these genes in cold-adapted mammals,” says Díez-del-Molino.
While previous studies have looked at the genomes of one or two woolly mammoths, this is the first comparison of a large number of mammoth genomes. This large sample size enabled the team to identify genes that were common among all woolly mammoths, and therefore likely adaptive, as opposed to genetic mutations that might only have been present in a single individual.
“We found that some of the genes that were previously thought to be special for woolly mammoths are actually variable between mammoths, which means they probably weren’t as important,” says Díez-del-Molino.
Overall, the 700,000-year-old Chukochya genome shared approximately 91.7% of the mutations that caused protein-coding changes in the more modern woolly mammoths. This means that many of the woolly mammoth’s defining traits—including thick fur, fat metabolism, and cold-perception abilities—were probably already present when the woolly mammoth first diverged from its ancestor, the steppe mammoth.
However, these traits developed further in Chukochya’s descendants.
“The very earliest woolly mammoths weren’t fully evolved,” says Dalén “They possibly had larger ears, and their wool was different—perhaps less insulating and fluffy compared to later woolly mammoths.”
More modern woolly mammoths also had several immune mutations in T cell antigens that were not seen in their ancestor. The authors speculate that these mutations may have conferred enhanced cell-mediated immunity in response to emerging viral pathogens.
Working with ancient mammoth DNA comes with a slew of hurdles. “Every step of the way, things are a bit more difficult, from fieldwork, to lab work, to bioinformatics,” says Díez-del-Molino.
“Apart from the field work, where we have to battle both polar bears and mosquitos, another aspect that makes this much more difficult is that you have to work in an ancient DNA laboratory, and that means that you have to dress up in this full-body suit with a hood and face mask and visor and double gloves, so doing the lab work is rather uncomfortable to put it mildly,” says Dalén. “I would like to highlight Marianne Dehasque, the second author of this paper, who did the herculean effort of performing lab work on most of these samples.”
All the mammoths whose genomes were included in this study were collected in Siberia, but the researchers hope to branch out and compare North American woolly mammoths in the future. “We showed a couple of years ago that there was gene flow between woolly mammoths and the ancestors of Colombian mammoths, so that’s something that we will need to account for because North American woolly mammoths might have been carrying non-woolly mammoth genes as well,” says Dalén.
Woolly mammoths evolved smaller ears and woolier coats while in the Siberian steppes. Gallery
1 A permafrost-preserved foot of a woolly mammoth discovered in 2018 by the Indigirka river in Siberia (photo by Love Dalén)
2 The ear and part of skin from a woolly mammoth. This specimen (with sample ID: YakInf) is one of the mammoths included in the paper, and yielded the highest quality mammoth genome ever sequenced. The specimen was discovered in 2018 by the Indigirka river in Siberia (photo by Love Dalén)
3 Hind legs from the Yuka mammoth, whose genome was included in the analyses (sample ID: YaK39.1K). The Yuka mammoth was discovered in northern Siberia in 2010 (photo by Love Dalén)
4 A permafrost-preserved foot of a woolly mammoth discovered in 2018 by the Indigirka river in Siberia (photo by Love Dalén)
5 The tusk of a woolly mammoth, from which the authors sequenced the entire genome. The tusk (sample ID: Chu17.6K) was discovered in northeastern Siberia in 2015 and has been radiocarbon dated to ca 18,000 years before present (photo by Love Dalén)
6 Woolly fur from the Yuka mammoth (photo by Love Dalén)
7 Footpad and fur from the Yuka mammoth (photo by Love Dalén)
8 Woolly mammoth tusk (same tusk as in P5) discovered in northeastern Siberia (photo by Love Dalén)
9 Study co-author Love Dalén with the Yuka mammoth (see P3 for details; photo by Ian Watts)
10 Study co-author Marianne Dehasque working in the ancient DNA lab at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm (photo by Jens Lasthein)
11 The molar tooth of a young female mammoth discovered in northeastern Siberia in 2015. The genome from this specimen (sample ID: Chu29.1K) was included in the study (photo by Peter Mortensen)
1 A permafrost-preserved foot of a woolly mammoth discovered in 2018 by the Indigirka river in Siberia (photo by Love Dalén)
2 The ear and part of skin from a woolly mammoth. This specimen (with sample ID: YakInf) is one of the mammoths included in the paper, and yielded the highest quality mammoth genome ever sequenced. The specimen was discovered in 2018 by the Indigirka river in Siberia (photo by Love Dalén)
3 Hind legs from the Yuka mammoth, whose genome was included in the analyses (sample ID: YaK39.1K). The Yuka mammoth was discovered in northern Siberia in 2010 (photo by Love Dalén)
4 A permafrost-preserved foot of a woolly mammoth discovered in 2018 by the Indigirka river in Siberia (photo by Love Dalén)
5 The tusk of a woolly mammoth, from which the authors sequenced the entire genome. The tusk (sample ID: Chu17.6K) was discovered in northeastern Siberia in 2015 and has been radiocarbon dated to ca 18,000 years before present (photo by Love Dalén)
6 Woolly fur from the Yuka mammoth (photo by Love Dalén)
7 Footpad and fur from the Yuka mammoth (photo by Love Dalén)
8 Woolly mammoth tusk (same tusk as in P5) discovered in northeastern Siberia (photo by Love Dalén)
9 Study co-author Love Dalén with the Yuka mammoth (see P3 for details; photo by Ian Watts)
10 Study co-author Marianne Dehasque working in the ancient DNA lab at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm (photo by Jens Lasthein)
11 The molar tooth of a young female mammoth discovered in northeastern Siberia in 2015. The genome from this specimen (sample ID: Chu29.1K) was included in the study (photo by Peter Mortensen)
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This research was supported by the Swedish Research Council, FORMAS, the Carl Tryggers Foundation, the SciLifeLab, the Wallenberg Data Driven Life Science Program, the Wallenberg Academy, and the Russian Science Foundation.
Earliest Ichthyosaur from Age of Dinosaurs found on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen
For nearly 190 years, scientists have searched for the origins of ancient sea-going reptiles from the Age of Dinosaurs. Now a team of Swedish and Norwegian palaeontologists has discovered remains of the earliest known ichthyosaur or ‘fish-lizard’ on the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen.
Ichthyosaurs were an extinct group of marine reptiles whose fossils have been recovered worldwide. They were amongst the first land living animals to adapt to life in the open sea, and evolved a ‘fish-like’ body shape similar to modern whales. Ichthyosaurs were at the top of the food chain in the oceans while dinosaurs roamed the land, and dominated marine habitats for over 160 million years.
Reconstruction of the earliest ichthyosaur and the 250-million-year-old ecosystem found on Spitsbergen. Credits: Illustration: Esther van Hulsen
According to the textbooks, reptiles first ventured into the open sea after the end-Permian mass extinction, which devastated marine ecosystems and paved the way for the dawn of the Age of Dinosaurs nearly 252 million years ago. As the story goes, land-based reptiles with walking legs invaded shallow coastal environments to take advantage marine predator niches that were left vacant by this cataclysmic event.
Computed tomography image and cross-section showing internal bone structure of vertebrae from the earliest ichthyosaur. Credits: Øyvind Hammer and Jørn Hurum
Over time, these early amphibious reptiles became more efficient at swimming and eventually modified their limbs into flippers, developed a ‘fish-like’ body shape, and started giving birth to live young; thus, severing their final tie with the land by not needing to come ashore to lay eggs.The new fossils discovered on Spitsbergen are now revising this long accepted theory.
Animal remains on the ancient seabed
Close to the hunting cabins on the southern shore of Ice Fjord in western Spitsbergen, Flower’s valley cuts through snow-capped mountains exposing rock layers that were once mud at the bottom of the sea around 250 million years ago. A fast-flowing river fed by snow melt has eroded away the mudstone to reveal rounded limestone boulders called concretions.
These formed from limey sediments that settled around decomposing animal remains on the ancient seabed, subsequently preserving them in spectacular three-dimensional detail. Paleontologists today hunt for these concretions to examine the fossil traces of long-dead sea creatures.
Fossil-bearing rocks on Spitsbergen that produce the earliest ichthyosaur remains. Credits: Benjamin Kear
During an expedition in 2014, a large number of concretions were collected from Flower’s valley and shipped back to the Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo for future study. Research conducted with The Museum of Evolution at Uppsala University has now identified bony fish and bizarre ‘crocodile-like’ amphibian bones, together with 11 articulated tail vertebrae from an ichthyosaur.
Unexpectedly, these vertebrae occurred within rocks that were supposedly too old for ichthyosaurs. Also, rather than representing the textbook example of an amphibious ichthyosaur ancestor, the vertebrae are identical to those of geologically much younger larger-bodied ichthyosaurs, and even preserve internal bone microstructure showing adaptive hallmarks of fast growth, elevated metabolism and a fully oceanic lifestyle.
Before the beginning of the Age of Dinosaurs
Geochemical testing of the surrounding rock confirmed the age of the fossils at approximately two million years after the end-Permian mass extinction. Given the estimated timescale of oceanic reptile evolution, this pushes back the origin and early diversification of ichthyosaurs to before the beginning of the Age of Dinosaurs; thereby forcing a revision of the textbook interpretation and revealing that ichthyosaurs probably first radiated into marine environments prior to the extinction event.
”Excitingly, the discovery of the oldest ichthyosaur rewrites the popular vision of Age of Dinosaurs as the emergence timeframe of major reptile lineages. It now seems that at least some groups predated this landmark interval, with fossils of their most ancient ancestors still awaiting discovery in even older rocks on Spitsbergen and elsewhere in the world,” says Benjamin Kear, researcher at Museum of Evolution, Uppsala University.
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