Drumming and singing at the same time is impressive, whether you’re Karen Carpenter, Ringo Starr or a chimpanzee. Japanese researchers report that Ayumu, a 26-year-old male chimpanzee and alpha of his group at Kyoto University’s Institute for the Evolutionary Origins of Human Behavior (EHUB), has been spontaneously tearing floorboards from a walkway, fashioning them into instruments and performing extended drumming displays while vocalizing. “I was surprised,” primatologist Yuko Hattori told Mongabay. “Chimpanzee drumming-like behavior has been reported before, for example when they throw stones or hit old tree trunks. However, behavior like this — using a stick in a way that closely resembled playing a drum — has not been reported before.” Over two years beginning in February 2023, Hattori and her team recorded 89 of Ayumu’s spontaneous performances across 37 days. Their study, published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, found that Ayumu’s drumming was rhythmically structured, not random, and bore a striking resemblance to the vocal calls chimpanzees use to communicate across long distances. Wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) are known to drum on the buttress roots of trees, producing low-frequency booms that can be heard more than a kilometer away. A 2025 study in Current Biology analyzed more than 370 drumming bouts across 11 wild chimpanzee communities and found that this percussion is rhythmic and varies by subspecies. Western chimpanzees drum with evenly spaced beats, while eastern chimpanzees alternate between shorter and longer intervals. Ayumu didn’t just drum, he pried loose floorboards from his…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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