Chimpanzees follow human pointing when attention is engaged

Pointing is central to human communication and cooperative information sharing. By 12–14 months, infants understand adults' helpful communicative intentions when they point to the location of a hidden toy. In contrast, decades of ape pointing studies have yielded negative results, leading to the influential claim that chimpanzees do not understand cooperative communicative intentions. We test an alternative account proposing that limitations in attentional engagement, rather than socio-cognitive competence, constrain chimpanzees' performance in pointing tasks. Chimpanzees ( N = 9) successfully used cooperative pointing to locate hidden food when ostensive name-calling and species-typical food vocalizations accompanied the gesture but failed in a closely matched condition lacking attention-grabbing auditory cues. These results are in line with the hypothesis that chimpanzees understand cooperative communicative intentions and suggest that the field may have misdiagnosed the source of prior failures, as insufficient attentional engagement, rather than absent socio-cognitive competence, may be the key limiting factor.