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When it comes to DIY stereotypes suggest that men are more adept than women.

But new research has revealed that females may actually be better at mastering the use of tools - at least among chimpanzees.

Researchers have found that female chimps are more likely to use the tools to help them hunt for food while males tend to prefer capturing prey with their hands.

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Primatologists at Iowa State University recorded 300 hunts by chimps in Fongoli, Sénégal, and found female chimps were using tools to capture prey in 60 per cent of the observations. This female chimp has stripped a stick of leaves and uses it to flush out a bush baby from a hollow tree trunk

While the findings may provoke some to reassess their view of the opposite sex, the research may also provide tantalising hints at how humans first learned to use weapons to hunt.

It suggests that early female humans were perhaps the first to begin fashioning simple tools to help them catch prey.

Writing in the journal Royal Society Open Science, Dr Jill Pruetz, a primatologist at Iowa State University said: 'Savannah-dwelling chimpanzees at Fongoli, Sénégal, are the only non-human population known to systematically hunt vertebrate prey with tools.

'Acquiring vertebrate prey via tool use at Fongoli supports the hypothesis that early hominins intensified their tool technology to overcome environmental pressures and that even the earliest hominins were probably sophisticated enough to fashion tools for hunting.

'The behaviour of these chimpanzees demonstrates that hunting is less adult male-biased among our closest living relatives than previously believed when tools are used.

'If tool use enabled early hominins to reduce the need for physical characteristics (i.e. greater size, strength) to achieve hunting efficiency, such sexual dimorphism ultimately becomes less important regarding prey acquisition.'

Scientists first reported chimps using spear-like sticks to hunt prey at Fongoli in Senegal in 2007, and it was later filmed by the BBC in their hugely successful natural history series Life Story.

Over the following years Dr Pruetz and her team have recorded 308 hunts using tools.

Tools tended to be used when the chimps were hunting bush babies, called Galago.

When Dr Pruetz and her colleagues analysed the hunts they had recorded, however, they found that more of them tended to be carried out by female chimps.

The findings were surprising as most hunting behaviour is conducted by males and overall they account for 70 per cent of all prey captured.

The chimps at Fongoli in Senegal (shown above) are the only animals to regularly hunt for prey with tools. Scientists first reported chimps using spear-like sticks to hunt prey at Fongoli in Senegal in 2007, and it was later filmed by the BBC in their hugely successful natural history series Life Story

Researchers observed more female chimps using broken sticks like above to help them capture prey. However, the male chimpanzees tended to capture larger prey and used their hands

However, the male chimpanzees tended to capture larger prey and used their hands. Females carried out 61 per cent of the hunts using tools.

They found that even in hunts involving tools, male chimps would often capture prey driven into their hands by those wielding tools.

Dr Pruetz added: 'What would often happen is the male would be in the vicinity of another chimp hunting with a tool, often a female, and the bush baby was able to escape the female and the male grabbed the bush baby as it fled.'

She added: 'It's just another example of diversity in chimp behavior that we keep finding the longer we study wild chimps.'

Other groups of chimpanzees have been seen to use tools in other ways to help them gather hard to reach food - such as using sticks to 'fish' for termites.

Again these activities tend to be dominated by females, but Dr Pruetz said it could not be easily compared to the hunting behaviour seen at Fongoli.

She said: 'Fishing for termites is a very different activity than jabbing for a bush baby.'

Tool use by chimpanzees is now considered to be fairly widespread with many groups having been observed using stones or sticks to crack open nuts, fish for termites and in some cases to capture small mammals

'With fishing, termites grab on to a twig and don't let go and the chimp eats the termites off the twig.

'When hunting, the bush baby tries to bite, escape or hide from the chimp. The chimps are really averse to being bitten by a bush baby.'

Instead she believes there is something very specific about the open Savannah environment compared to forests that has driven the chimps living at Fongoli to use tools in this way.

She said that hunting bush babies with tools may be a way of allowing them to get access to a highly nutritious food source without having to chase down their prey.

Something similar may have happened with early humans as their environment changed to become more Savannah like.

Male chimpanzee watches female who's using ant-dipping tool

Writing in the journal, the researchers said: 'The Savannah environment might be viewed as the catalyst for tool-assisted hunting by Savannah chimpanzees in Sénégal in that apes here exploit prey that is largely ignored by forest-dwelling chimpanzees.

'Chimpanzees' preferred prey at other sites, the red colobus monkey (Piliocolobus badius) is absent in the dry, open Savannah-woodland at Fongoli.

'Galago hunting at Fongoli represents a high-energy, low-risk resource that members of various age–sex classes can take advantage of, similar to what is observed among tool-equipped human hunters.

'Additionally, typical adult male chimpanzee arboreal hunting behaviour was unlikely to be characteristic of early bipedal hominins given the latter's anatomical differences with living apes.

'With such anatomical changes in our lineage, tool use probably became increasingly important to hunting behaviour.'