About

David Attenborough Watching an Orangutan Hammer, also known as Man Watching Ape Use Tools, refers to a viral video of British naturalist David Attenborough observing an orangutan using a hammer and a hand saw. In May 2024, the video achieved popularity as a meme format on X / Twitter, where it was combined with captions about watching someone being inept at something.

Origin

On February 5th, 2003, episode 10 titled "Food for Thought" of the nature documentary series The Life of Mammals, presented by David Attenborough, premiered.^[1] In one scene of the episode, Attenborough observes a female orangutan using a hammer and a hand saw. On May 18th, 2009, the YouTube^[2] channel BBC Earth uploaded the clip, which accumulated over 8.9 million views in 15 years (shown below).

On May 10th, 2024, X^[3] / Twitter user @vxunderground posted the clip with the caption "C programmers watching Python programmers work." The post (shown below) received over 4 million views, 4,800 reposts and 46,000 likes in five days.

C programmers watching Python programmers work pic.twitter.com/0q7kOFe1rR

— vx-underground (@vxunderground) May 11, 2024

Spread

The post was followed by more users posting caption memes based on the clip in mid-May 2024, pairing the video with jokes about watching someone being inept at something. For example, on May 11th, 2024, X^[4] user @MathMatize posted a joke about physicists doing math that received over 2,800 reposts and 14,000 likes in four days (shown below).

Mathematicians watching physicists do math pic.twitter.com/10SZteJkAa

— MathMatize Memes (@MathMatize) May 11, 2024

On May 12th, 2024, X^[5] user @alonsosilva captioned the image with a joke about data scientists, which received over 470 reposts and 2,600 likes in three days. On May 14th, X^[6] user @tunguz replied with a joke about software engineers (shown below), which garnered over 1,500 reposts and 15,000 likes in the same period.

Data Scientists watching Software Engineers analyze data. https://t.co/EM5gfV4hRe

— Bojan Tunguz (@tunguz) May 14, 2024

Various Examples

FAA inspectors watching Boeing engineers fix their planes pic.twitter.com/m1jr05LVuF

— Not Jerome Powell (@alifarhat79) May 14, 2024

The Chinese watching American policymakers work pic.twitter.com/DijnUuRES1

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) May 13, 2024

Search Interest

External References