Do chimpansees ask for help? A very simple question about complex behavior.

The short answer is yes they do ask for help, but not from other chimps! Researchers in Japan hid food under a stone and taught the chimps that they can move the stone to get to the food. Then they replaced the stone with a much heavier one, a stone that one chimp cannot move on its own and must seek help to move. Initially, they didn’t know how to get to the food, but eventually, they learned to ask for help from a researcher standing nearby. It would look at the researcher’s face, vocalize some sounds, grab its hand and make it hold the stone’s handles! However, it would not do the same with a chimp.

Anyway, there is a lot more to this as the video below shows. If you’re interested, the paper is titled Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) learn to act with other individuals in a cooperative task.