The aims of my project were:

1) To assess, using for the first time direct evidence (video recordings), individual hand preferences in manual and tool digging.

To do so, I performed and experiment in which the chimpanzees dug to extract food that I previously buried.

2) To explore the consistency of these preferences across time.

3) To investigate hand preference consistency across tasks.

In order to do this, I assessed the laterality of four motor tasks involving tool use (the honey extraction task, the tube task, the puzzle feeder task and the termite fishing task)  and compared them with the results from the digging experiment.

4) To explore sex differences in terms of direction and strength of hand preference in the different tasks.

5) Compare the two modalities of digging: manual and tool use digging.

As digging by chimpanzees had never been recorded before, I conducted a comparison in terms of duration, frequency and sex differences  between the two digging modalities.

6) To analyze the characteristics of the tools used for digging.

7) To explore the influence of climatic factors (precipitation and temperature) on the digging activity.