What Chimps Reveal About Human Parenting

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YesYoung chimpanzees differ from human children in one key way: Hairier creatures seem to take physical risks earlier.

According to data from around the world, people tend to behave more recklessly during adolescence, and boys are more likely to take risks than girls. To find out more about this phenomenon, scientists have set up experiments where they ask young people to take economic risks. But it is unclear how physical risk-taking, such as during active sport or play, unfolds during childhood and adolescence. It’s obviously unethical to conduct experiments where people can be harmed, but observing one of our closest relatives living in the wild could provide useful clues.

Compared to humans, baby chimpanzees appear to act like daredevils earlier in life, according to a paper published today in iScience.

Scientists drew this idea from recordings of 119 chimpanzees in the wild at Kibale National Park in Uganda. They measured risky behavior through instances of “free flight,” such as voluntarily falling from a branch or completely letting go by moving between branches. The team observed that infant chimpanzees were three times more likely to live dangerously than adult chimpanzees, while juveniles were 2.5 times more likely and adolescents 2.1 times more likely. Chimpanzees are considered infants until about 5 years old, juveniles between 5 and 10 years old, and adolescents between 10 and 15 years old.

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The researchers noticed that the carefree abandon observed in these chimpanzees seemed to gradually decrease with age, and was not linked to the sex of the individual or their distance from the ground. Chimpanzees spend most of their days scrambling through trees to find food, and the type of play scientists observed could help them learn more about the dangers of falling while being less vulnerable to injury. It could also give them the opportunity to refine their locomotor skills.

Researchers at the University of Michigan and James Madison University in Virginia suspect that varying parental supervision could help explain this difference between chimpanzees and humans. After all, we are the only surviving great ape species in which multiple community members, beyond parents, provide extensive care to our young. But in chimpanzees, this responsibility is left to the mother. Baby chimpanzees begin moving independently relatively early in life, compared to humans, and their mothers cannot always chase them from tree to tree.

“Chimpanzees simply don’t have the capabilities that we have to constrain their behavior,” Lauren Sarringhaus, study co-author and biologist at James Madison University, said in a statement. “Overall, it’s very different for humans.”

Around the world and in a diversity of cultures, people tend to closely supervise young children for most of the day, whether from older children, parents, or other nearby adults. Rather than having an innate adolescent tendency to seek thrills, people may take more risks in adolescence because they are finally free from near-constant surveillance.

The contrasting data from monkeys suggest that these care practices influenced patterns of physical risk-taking in humans. “Given the close evolutionary and developmental similarities between humans and chimpanzees, we hypothesize that if surveillance were relaxed, physical risk-taking in humans would increase before adolescence,” the authors wrote.

It is likely that very few parents are willing to test this hypothesis.

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Main image: Abeselom Zerit / Shutterstock

• Molly Glick

  Published on January 7, 2026

  Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.