Chimps Performing First Aid

For years, we have known chimpanzees as smart. We also know that they sometimes use leaves or insects as medicine. Now, in the Buodngo Forest in Uganda, scientists have discovered that they provide “first aid’ to each other. This suggests that chimpanzees may be able to think about how to help others and themselves.

In 2021, Dr. Elodie Freymann went to Uganda to study the chimps in the Bugondo Forest. She was interested in the way that chimps help themselves when they get hurt. She has also studied on the way chimps eat certain plants and how they use them as medicine. She looked through 30 years of notes from researchers who had studied chimps in the forest. They found 34 examples of chimps treating their wounds, like licking a wound or cleaning themselves with leaves. They also chewed the plants up and then applied them to an open injury.

plants can do this, too, though. The researchers from the notes also found out that chimps could tell whether another chimp needed help. They say that a teenage male chimp sucks on the leg of another young male chimp to help clean a wound. Even if they weren’t related, they would still help each other.

One question the scientists have is how much of this behavior comes from chimps’ instincts, and how much is learned from other chimps. They saw that a mother chimp chewed leaves and put them on her wound, and then saw her daughter do the same thing. Dr. Freymann believes that some behaviors are from instinct, but others are learned.