Chimpanzees or human cousins? Teenage chimps tear leaves and flirt like humans to score dates

Chimps, our closest primate cousins, show habits that are similar to human behaviour in ways that always surprise us. From tool usage to social drama, their actions hint at the roots of our own habits, like those awkward teen moments when flirting feels like a high-stakes game. Watching them deal with attraction brings to light shared evolutionary links, including using and tearing leaves for flirting!

Chimpanzees use leaves to flirt with lovers

Adolescent chimpanzees flirt by tearing leaves near their crush, copying human teen awkwardness. Professor Cat Hobaiter from the University of St Andrews, after 20+ years studying primate gestures, calls it "basically chimp flirting. It's like a chimp pick-up line, you tear a little leaf at someone to show you like them," she shared at the AAAS conference in Phoenix, Arizona, as covered by Daily Mail.

Mostly males targeting females in estrus, it works both ways. "You certainly get some females who will use it," Hobaiter noted. "It's almost like when teenage girls are trying to work out how to get attention." The distinct ripping sound carries far, grabbing notice.

Some chimps are loud, others quiet

Some chimps pluck silently, like "plucking daisy petals... 'She loves me, she loves me not'," Hobaiter explained. This quiet game suits avoiding rivals, "Maybe you don't want to give the game away to the big guy around the corner that might out-compete you." Her team's study in Uganda's Scientific Reports analysed two neighbouring East African chimp communities. "Across communities, this behaviour primarily occurs in sexual contexts and is argued to function as a courtship behaviour to solicit copulations, particularly by young males toward females in oestrus," it states.

One group favored mouth-ripping "leaf-clip," the other twig-pulling "leaf tear-pull," hinting at cultural learning: "The observed variation... suggests that these differences are, at least in part, socially derived".

Chimpanzees have other human-like gestures too

Chimps have around 150 decoded gestures mirroring ours. Palm-out reach means "gimme," shooing says "go away," hand nudge is "budge up," loud scratch starts grooming. Spins mean "stop that," arm raises "let's move."