LISTEN TO THIS ARTICLE Play Pause Skip backwardsGo ten seconds backward Skip forwardsGo ten seconds forward Progress 1.0x Mute Unmute Volume is at 50% 00:00 6:04 1.0x Audio is AI-generated. Report an issue | Give feedback Deep in the rainforest of Africa, a male chimpanzee approaches a tall tree with prominent roots and begins to slap them vigorously, creating a deep, percussive sound that can be heard kilometers away. Such “drumming” allows chimps to communicate across long distances. Now, two studies show the animals also drum to a distinct beat, which varies across chimp societies. The research suggests chimpanzees can learn and develop different rhythms, suggesting this musical ability may have evolved in our shared common ancestor. “It’s just super-cool,” says Alexander Piel, an evolutionary anthropologist at University College London who was not involved in the work. Even though researchers have known for decades that chimpanzees drum, he says, now we start to see that “there’s variability in these patterns—and a drum isn’t [just] a drum.” SIGN UP FOR THE AWARD-WINNING SCIENCEADVISER NEWSLETTER The latest news, commentary, and research, free to your inbox daily Sign up Chimpanzees live in big, social societies; their main way to communicate is through vocalizations, including pant hoots—the iconic, loud sounds that can be heard more than 1 kilometer away—and gestures such as raising their arms and stroking their mouths. Primatologists have also described chimps drumming on the roots of trees in the wild, but whether this was a form of communication was unclear. To better understand how chimps use drumming, Catherine Hobaiter, a primatologist at the University of St. Andrews, and her team looked at two subspecies—eastern chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii), which live in savanna grasslands and dry woodlands in East Africa, and western chimpanzees (P.t. verus), which live in lush rainforests in West Africa. The scientists analyzed more than 370 drumming bouts across 11 communities in six populations of these chimps—recordings that span almost 25 years. “This is probably the biggest data set of chimpanzee drumming that exists out there in the world,” Hobaiter says. The team found that chimpanzees consistently produce rhythmic drumming patterns—and that these vary across populations. Western chimps drum with evenly spaced beats, “like the ticking of a clock,” says Vesta Eleuteri, a behavioral biologist at the University of Vienna who led the study, published today in Current Biology. In contrast, eastern chimps alternate between short and long silences after each hit (see video, below). Advertisement Some previous studies suggested chimps in captivity drum with rhythm, but this is the first paper to comprehensively show the same is true of wild chimps, says Valérie Dufour, an animal cognition biologist at the French national research agency CNRS and the University of Clermont Auvergne who was not involved in the work. The two subspecies of chimp also combined their drumming with pant hooting and swaying in different ways. The western chimpanzees typically began drumming earlier in the vocalization sequence—during the build-up phase—whereas eastern chimpanzees often delayed drumming until they uttered a climactic scream. The researchers think these different drumming styles could be influenced by the social dynamics of each subspecies: Eastern chimps live in big groups and tend to be more aggressive with their neighbors, whereas western chimps live in smaller, more egalitarian groups. Western chimpanzees produce evenly spaced hits, whereas eastern chimps alternate between hits at shorter and longer time intervals, producing different patterns of drumming.Eleuteri et al., Current Biology 2025 In a second study, published on Tuesday in Biology Letters, Marc Naguib, an acoustic communication biologist at Wageningen University & Research, and his team focused on another unusual chimp behavior: using stones to drum on tree trunks. The researchers scoured years of camera trap footage from Western chimpanzee populations in Guinea-Bissau, who are known to hoard stones around trees. The team found that the chimps regularly threw stones against tree trunks, usually using the rocks they had already stored there, rather than bringing new ones. This suggests the animals’ stone hoarding behavior is not focused on tool accumulation, but may have a communication purpose, the team says. Stone-assisted drumming also differed from regular drumming in subtle ways: In the lead-up to stone throwing, chimpanzees were more likely to pant-hoot and less likely to sway their bodies, for instance. “This is something special,” Naguib says. “It’s a unique example of using a tool to produce a new signal.” This behavior is likely socially learned and culturally transmitted within certain groups, he says. “It’s extremely difficult” to do this kind of research with chimps in the wild, Dufour says. “That’s really commendable about both studies.” More detailed work could be done with captive chimps to study subspecies differences, as well as cultural ones, she says. In 2015, she showed that a captive chimpanzee named Barney was able to drum spontaneously with hints of musicality. “We really need this kind of studies … to go further into the origins of musicality,” she adds. Naguib agrees. “Maybe this is linked to the evolution of music,” he says. “I think we’re just scratching at the surface,” Hobaiter says. Drumming is “this really rich behavior that’s going to … tell us so much more about what it means to be a chimpanzee.” In any case, the subspecies and cultural differences could help the conservation efforts of chimpanzees’ habitats. In recent years, researchers have pushed to include animal culture in conservation policy. “You need these diverse populations to maintain the richness of a species,” Naguib says. “But if you lose a culture, like in humans, you won’t get it back.”

LISTEN TO THIS ARTICLE Play Pause Skip backwardsGo ten seconds backward Skip forwardsGo ten seconds forward Progress 1.0x Mute Unmute Volume is at 50% 00:00 5:52 1.0x Audio is AI-generated. Report an issue | Give feedback Long before modern humans reached Europe, other toolmakers from the hominin family tree crafted sharp-tipped wooden spears on the shores of a lake in what today is central Germany. Bones found nearby suggest the arsenal was used to hunt horses. When researchers first uncovered the spears in the 1990s, they estimated the site was 400,000 years old, based on the estimated ages of the sediment layers above and below the layer that yielded the spears and bones. If so, the weapons’ makers were most likely members of Homo heidelbergensis, a hominin some researchers think was ancestral to both modern humans and Neanderthals. New studies in the decades since shifted the age younger, to about 300,000 years old. But in a paper published today in Science Advances, a team argues that dates obtained from snail shells at the site suggest the spears’ real age is closer to 200,000 years old, implicating a totally different craftsperson: our close cousins, the Neanderthals. If so, it would resolve a long-standing archaeological mystery and underscore Neanderthals’ cleverness and social complexity. “I find the presented data set robust,” says Tobias Lauer, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen who was not involved in the new research. “It helps us a lot to better understand the behavioral complexity of early humans.” SIGN UP FOR THE AWARD-WINNING SCIENCEADVISER NEWSLETTER The latest news, commentary, and research, free to your inbox daily Sign up Archaeologists first found the wooden tools preserved in an open-pit coal mine in Schöningen, Germany. Precisely dating such artifacts is a challenge: The most precise, radiocarbon dating, is only useful back to about 60,000 years. Other methods, such as chemically measuring the last time sediments were exposed to sunlight or matching geologic layers to known epochs, all have their own limitations. Preliminary estimates based on signs of ice ages in the layers above and below the spears dated the site to a warmer “interglacial” period that was a time of transition between two species of ancient hominin. The site and its spears were considered too old to be reliably attributed to Neanderthals, who emerged in Europe and the Middle East about 400,000 years ago. However, it was also a little too late to be clearly connected to H. heidelbergensis, which faded from the European scene about 300,000 years ago and which some scientists argue may have been the most recent common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals. That ambiguity has plagued scientists for decades. “Schöningen was an outlier because of how well preserved the artifacts were, but also because its age didn’t match anything else,” says Olaf Jöris, an archaeologist at the Leibniz Center for Archaeology who co-authored the new study. Advertisement “Because it’s so difficult to date sites from the last million years, a lot of these sites are floating in time,” adds University of York geochemist and co-author Kirsty Penkman. “If we can do anything to narrow down the time windows, those sites become more useful for answering archaeological questions about human evolution and cultural development.” To sharpen the timeline at Schöningen, Penkman analyzed molecules trapped in the mineralized shells of tiny freshwater snail fossils. Crushing the sesame seed–size trapdoors of the shells and dissolving their calcium released amino acids, which break down at a predictable rate. By measuring this breakdown across several different amino acids, she was able to estimate the age of the fossil snails, and by extension the spears found in the same layer of sediment. The new dates put their age at about 200,000 years old. “It’s a bit disappointing when you make sites younger rather than older,” Penkman says, “but being 200,000 years old makes more sense from an archaeological perspective.” Placing Schöningen in this time window—which falls during a period known as the Middle Paleolithic—makes sense because during it, complex behaviors began to emerge among ancient hominins. Neanderthals are known to have lived in small bands from Europe to Central Asia during the Middle Paleolithic, developing sophisticated hunting behaviors and stone tools. The expertly crafted implements at Schöningen show a deep knowledge of woodworking. The site’s layout also suggests that, in a display of complex team tactics, Neanderthals herded horses to trap them at the edge of the prehistoric lake. “The dating looks very good,” says Andrzej Wiśniewski, an archaeologist at the University of Wrocław who was not involved with the new dating. “Two hundred thousand years ago makes a lot of sense.” Others argue the line between H. heidelbergensis and Neanderthals is fuzzy, making it hard to confidently say which species made the spears. “Somewhere around 300,000 years ago we see a transition to Neanderthals,” says Georg August University of Göttingen archaeologist Thomas Terberger. “But was there a big difference between late heidelbergensis and early Neanderthals in terms of hunting strategies? I’m not so sure.” But Jöris says the evidence fits with other aspects of shifting Neanderthal lifestyles and behaviors. About 200,000 years ago, skeletal remains from across Europe show Neanderthals started living longer, suggesting their increasingly sophisticated sociality was paying off. “Something is changing in how they organize and cooperate,” Jöris says. “Rather than a few individuals taking on dangerous animals, they’re coming together in larger groups and pooling the risk.”

On Tuesday 6 May we held the first-ever Sussex Awards ceremony on campus at the Attenborough Centre. The ceremony was held to announce the winners of the new awards, which combine and expand upon the previous Education and Research Awards, and was hosted by Vice-Chancellor Professor Sasha Roseneil and Professor Michael Luck, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Provost. The awards programme is designed to recognise the brilliant work of our staff, students and postgraduate researcher (PGR) community across our Faculties and Divisions. The winners were presented with a very special trophy depicting the Arts A pillars, 3D printed here on campus using recycled plastics by Dr Andre Maia Chagas and his team. And Andre took one of the trophies home as he was a winner in the Open Research category! After the nominations closed in March, a judging panel for each category, made up of staff and, on some panels, students, reviewed over 700 nominations that students, staff and postgraduate researchers submitted this year. Together they chose the shortlist and winners in each of the 15 categories. The winners of this year’s Adam Weiler PGR Impact Awards were also presented with their awards on the night. Find out about this year’s winners and their incredible achievements: Inclusive Education category joint winners: Tim Cane and Tilly Ambrose, and the Global Studies Neurodivergent Working Group. Tim Cane and Tilly Ambrose, both based at the School of Global Studies, have gone above and beyond to ensure that a visually impaired student is able to enjoy a fully inclusive, safe and educationally rich learning experience. They created bespoke Braille labelling of lab equipment and tactile images of maps, which allowed the student to visualise and navigate complex topographies, and understand the evolution of environmental patterns and processes. The Global Studies Neurodivergent Working Group, led by Karis Jade Petty, Assistant Professor in Anthropology, is a collective of students and staff working together to create a supportive and inclusive learning community within the School of Global Studies and the wider University. The group have organised a variety of events where neurodivergent students have shared their top tips with others, and raised awareness of support and wellbeing at the University and beyond. Group members are: Karis Jade Petty, Maisie Farnham, Niamh Bowden, Jona Nicholls, Amira Lazar, Bradley Clark, Nellie Brown, Gladys Mwamba, Paul Boyce, Matthew Main, Marjorie Von Wallwitz Naum, Manish Surin, Mary Harding, Gizem Senoglu, Ashleigh Jennings, Emily Freestone, Jenny Mendez Silva, Vladica Jovanovic, Ophelia Jarvis, Stefanie Ortmann, Beth Sutton, Anna Laing, Phoebe Hoaen, Dom Kniveton and Cassy Roberts. Education for Employability and World Readiness category winners: Julia Hartviksen, Suchitra Richards and Jessica Eustace. Julia and Suchitra (both School of Global Studies) and Jessica Eustace (Student Experience team), have revitalised employability at the School of Global Studies by increasing enrolment on a final year module focused on work experience. They have built a database of placement organisations, supported students to identify their interests, and helped them secure a placement. They have also hosted an inspiring series of career workshops featuring alumni and Postgraduate students. Community Impact, Scholarship and Social Responsibility category winner: Alison Bailey. Alison, who is based at the Business School, has collaborated with Rewired Earth throughout the second-year module on Leadership Foundation. As part of this, students took part in a sustainability challenge set by Rewired Earth, who offered £1,000 and internships for the winning team. Students were able to put their leadership skills into practice by finding a sustainability problem in Sussex or the local area, and received mentoring from Rewired Earth and other organisations. They presented their projects to politicians and business leaders at the House of Lords, resulting in two of the Sussex student teams winning the competition. Collaborative Learning and Innovation category winners: The Engineering and Product Design Mentors. Based at the School of Engineering and Informatics, the Engineering and Product Design Mentors is a student-led initiative that fosters a welcoming, peer-focused environment where all students feel supported and empowered to learn. The mentors, who come from different disciplines in the School, organise regular drop-in session to provide support and feedback with assignments, or talk to other students about the challenges of university life. In collaboration with student societies and industry partners, mentors provide workshops that foster creativity, teamwork and problem-solving skills. Group members are: Elif Ucurum, Charlie Westpfel, Sunil Mistry, Mugdh Sangwan, Liv Camacho Wejbrandt, Anjola Oluwa Fajobi, Jasurbek Yusupov, Jayden Griffin, Mustafa Hassan, Milena A. Karwat and Max Goldbloom. Research and Innovation Excellence category winners: The Brains on Board team. The Brains on Board team, based at theSchool of Engineering and Informatics and the School of Life Sciences, has advanced the frontiers of insect-inspired neuromorphic AI in projects featuring sustainable energy efficient AI and robotics. The team have been co-investigators on over 10 grants, raising the University’s profile and their work has sparked new international collaborations. Team members are: Andy Philippides, Thomas Nowotny, Paul Graham, James Knight and James Bennett. Open Research category winner: Andre Maia Chagas. Andre, who is based at the School of Life Sciences, has created and disseminated open hardware, including cheap microscopes that can be used in labs or rural areas for health diagnosis. He has also helped the University to upcycle and support our sustainability efforts by avoiding the premature disposal of equipment, and co-organised and taught the skills needed for local production of scientific equipment in many workshops across Africa. Research and Innovation Culture category winners: Ozgu Karakulak and Daniel Fisher. Ozgu and Daniel, who are based at the Business School, have been recognised for their leadership of the Write Club which has enhanced the quality and quantity of research outputs in a structured yet supportive environment. Set up in 2022, the Write Club, which brought together two departments within the School: Management and Strategy & Marketing, has supported the development of writing skills for colleagues at all stages of their academic career. Research and Innovation Impact category winners: The Material Physics Group. The group, based at the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, has been awarded for their pioneering research in partnership with AMD, which resulted in the development ofnanomaterial technologies that deliver measurable benefits, including performance and energy efficiency, across multiple industries. Group members are: Alan Dalton, Alice King, Sean Ogilvie, Matthew Large, Peter Lynch, Manoj Tripathi, Aline Amorim Graf, Raquel Cano Cordero, Ahmed Alghamdi, Alex McCann, Kevin Doty, Jeremy Thorpe and Helen Ticktin-Smith. Postgraduate Researcher Support category winners: Guy Edwards, Josh Francis and Charlotte Austwick. Guy Edwards (School of Global Studies), Charlotte Austwick (School of Psychology) and Josh Francis (School of Global Studies) created a programme of outputs and events celebrating neurodiversity for Sussex postgraduate researchers which has fostered and created a safe space and a positive cultural change in the research community at Sussex. Global Engagement category winners: The Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium (TIP-C) team. The TIP-C team, based at the Business School, have strengthened ties and promoted initiatives through their work with TIP-C’s Latin American and Caribbean Transformative Innovation Hub. The innovative methods developed by the team have been adopted by United Nations bodies, including the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development framework. In September 2024, the team held an Engagement Week in Barcelona, which brought together 150 leaders from over 30 countries from the private and public sectors, showcasing Sussex’s cutting-edge research, and encouraging cross-sector collaborations. Team members are: Matias Ramirez, Claudia Obando Rodriguez, Pip Bolton, Abbas Abdul, Bipashyee Ghosh, Ed Steinmueller, Phil Johnstone, Chux Daniels, Victoria Shaw, ViktoriiaKrytska, Jessie Madrigal-Fletcher, Rob Byrne and David Brimage. Civic Engagement category winners: Stephen Wilkins and the Sussex Universe team. Stephen and the Sussex Universe team have played a transformative role in making science accessible to the wider community The Sussex Universe public lecture series is a platform for researchers to showcase their research and inspire, educate and connect people with the University’s research and expertise. Inclusive Sussex category winner: Chris Derbyshire. Chris, who is based in the Communications, Engagement and Advancement Division, has worked tirelessly for years to support the access and participation of Gypsy, Roma, Traveller, Showman, Boater (GRTSB) young people at Sussex and within the wider community. Chris co-led the University’s application for a national pledge to support the inclusion of GTRSB students in higher education, and has worked on the Roma Holocaust memorialisation, which resulted in an exhibition at the Jubilee Library in Brighton. Contribution to Campus Life category winner: Chay Burt. Chay, based at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, is the coach of the University men’s football team. In this voluntary role, Chay provides support to team members both on and off the pitch. Whether they are facing personal or academic issues, Chay goes above and beyond, offering guidance, fostering connection and inspiring his players throughout their university experience. Environmental Sustainability category winners: The Climate Fresk team. The team, based at the Business School, have introduced climate awareness onto the curriculum by running Climate Fresk workshops. Just last term, over 500 students were trained to understand and address climate change, and over 20 have been inspired to become Climate Fresk facilitators. Team members are: Alexandra Pearson, Claire Tymoshyshyn and Alison Bailey. Institutional Improvement and Transformation category winner: Tina Lehmbeck  Tina, who works in the Research and Innovation Services Division, has been central to the development and implementation of WorkTribe, the new University Research Management system. Thanks to Tina’s experience and skills, the project was rolled out on the planned delivery dates. Back to all news