While the human world is busy over social, political, and scientific issues that seem not to give our lives a minute of peace; as we go about our business and rage over the new iPad, or think over the last meeting of the day, extraordinary things are happening and we do not see them.

One of these events caught the attention of Discovery News, and has been called the Great Chimp Tech Boom. Nowadays, our primate cousins are at the height of a revolution maybe hard to understand but very impressive from a cultural point of view. Poking at ants with a stick hardly seems like a top-of-the-line technological feat, but for chimpanzees a development in behaviour that is specific to a community rather than a species as a whole, is more important than we would expect. In fact, it testifies the appearance of clear “cultural variations” similar to what started to differentiate a human tribe from another.

According to British anthropologist Jane Goodall, technology among chimpanzees is improving and being adopted rapidly.

A team of evolutionary anthropologists and other animal behaviour researchers, including Goodall, have identified at least 39 community-specific behaviours within different groups of chimps, which range from methods of swatting flies  to variations on simple tools, like using stones to crack open nuts versus smashing them against the ground with a heavy piece of wood.

Poking at ants with a stick, ant fishing, is an amazing example of cultural variation for a couple of reasons. First, it requires a tool, which is used to retrieve ants and termites from their nests. The tool, once a simple stick, has now seen improvements; in 2009 a group of chimps were observed fraying the ends of their sticks to allow more surface area for catching ants and termites. Second, poking at ants is the first novel adaptation outside of captivity that we have witnessed moving from one group into another. According to a new report in the latest issue of Current Anthropology, ant fishing is really catching on, and it’s all thanks to a chimp named Trezia.

Trezia is a wild chimpanzee who lives in Gombe Stream National Park, amongst the Kasekela chimpanzee community. When Trezia was transferred to the Kasekela group from the separate Mitumba community, Trezia didn’t stop fishing for ants just because she lived in a new group. For her  poking at ants was an everyday behaviour, in fact in 1982 ant fishing was declared a customary behaviour within Trezia’s Mitumba home group. After Trezia’s relocation, it appeared in the Kaseleka group, and since 2010 it has become customary there as well.

It’s unsurprising that chimpanzees exhibit the highest rate of cultural variation of any non-human species. Chimpanzees are more closely related to humans than any other living species; so much so that in 2003 a team of biologists suggested moving chimps to the human branch of the family tree.

Of course, chimps are not the only primates to surprise observers with their technological artistry. A Japanese macaque named Imo figured out that washing the grit off of sweet potatoes made them better to eat, and taught an entire population of macaques to wash their food. Gorillas have recently been spotted dismantling snare traps left by poachers, a development that is marvellous. In Brazil, a group of Capuchin monkeys cracks palm nuts with stones but chooses the optimal stones for the job, by testing the rocks for sturdiness and weight, before wasting any time using them as hammers.

The world around us is developing, and our planet’s co-inhabitants are running their own extraordinary evolution, to pay attention cast a bright new light on how our lives are at times narrow-minded, and on how much we are actually missing out.