Like schmoozers at a convention, chimpanzees keep having to reintroduce themselves to us, though we’ve known them for forever. First we learned that they are sophisticated enough to use tools, devise hunting strategies, and establish intricate social structures. Now, several long-term field studies have come to an even more startling conclusion: Chimps have culture.

In the summer of 1960, a young English woman stood on the shores of Lake Tanganyika looking into the hills of Gombe Stream Reserve with her mother. From the shore, Gombe seems impossible to negotiate: Steep, tree-covered ridges and their corresponding ravines rise from the beach as if a giant child had reached down with spread fingers and scraped the landscape upward. The pant-hoot calls of chimpanzees--husky puffs of noise that rise quickly into wild screams--echo across the ravines and taunt any visitor to follow the apes across the undulating terrain.

The young woman spent the first months trying to catch up with her subjects, scrambling up cliffs, grabbing onto roots, and then standing perfectly still so as not to scare them away. The only way the chimps would tolerate her presence, she eventually found, was if she lured them close with bananas. Thus began a decades-long effort to follow around groups of chimpanzees to figure out what they can tell us about ourselves.


Her name, of course, was Jane Goodall, and in the years that followed she would become an icon of both sober science and exotic adventure. The willowy figure dressed in green fatigues, the limp blonde hair drawn back in a ponytail, the quiet British voice narrating innumerable National Geographic specials—these images and sounds are inextricably bound to the public’s understanding of chimp behavior. Before Goodall’s work, chimpanzees were known mostly from studies on animals that had been captured and imported to indoor and outdoor laboratories. Although psychobiologists like Robert Yerkes knew that chimps were smart, no one was sure how they used those smarts in the wild.

Chimpanzees speak in dialects, invent odd grooming styles, and drum better than most kids in marching bands. So what’s left to separate them from us?

“When I went to Gombe, nothing was known,” Goodall said recently, “Chimps weren’t allowed to have personalities—no names, no reasoning ability, no emotions. Until one recognized the individuals, you couldn’t work out the social structure, nor could you make any sense of the communication. It was so confusing.” Goodall’s work changed all that. Her detailed daily records of individual chimpanzees—maintained these days by other primatologists and field assistants—resulted in the first chimp personality portraits, as well as startling discoveries of chimpanzee tool use, hunting practices, and even murder.

That was just the beginning. For the past four decades, an army of researchers from Europe, Japan, and the United States has observed chimpanzees at more than 40 sites. In 1966 Toshisada Nishida began a study in the Mahale Mountains, 90 miles south of Gombe, and went on to identify the basic social structure of chimpanzee communities. In the 1970s, researchers discovered that chimps living in Guinea and Ivory Coast, on the far western edge of their species’s range, hunted and used tools differently from their eastern cousins. A decade later, Richard Wrangham, working in both Gombe and the Kibale National Park in Uganda, showed that chimps can act much the same even when they live in different habitats and have different diets. Takayoshi Kano and others, meanwhile, have cast a new light on chimpanzee behavior through studies of the bonobo, the chimpanzee’s more peaceable, more egalitarian cousin.

THICKER THAN BLOOD

Friendship, not kinship, is the strongest bond between male chimpanzees.

Male chimps tend to be a tight bunch. They sit close and groom each other, hunt together, and close ranks periodically to patrol their boundaries silently. Sometimes they even sneak outside their territory to beat up or kill males from neighboring groups. The compelling force behind all this male bonding, primatologists concluded, must be kinship. After all, males always stay in the group where they’re born, while females leave when they are sexually mature.

Now, thanks to molecular genetics, we know otherwise. Over the past nine years, in Uganda’s Kibale National Park, researchers from Harvard University and the University of Michigan have scavenged hair left by nesting and self-grooming chimpanzees. Embedded in those samples are cells that provide a dna blueprint of each chimp. When the researchers compared the chimps’ kinship to their behavior, they found that males who sit together and groom each other are not closely related. More significant still: Those who hunt and patrol borders together aren’t closely related either.

Kinship doesn’t underlie male cooperation, in other words.  Chimpanzees get to know each other and keep track of the political intrigue that goes with making, breaking, and manipulating relationships. Although kinship is important, chimps often also rely on the fragile ties of friendship.

They sound more like people every day. —M.F.S.

Last summer, researchers from seven long-term field sites combined their results in a landmark report in the journal Nature. Led by primatologist Andrew Whiten of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, they listed 39 chimpanzee behaviors that go beyond mere survival strategies. More important, those behaviors vary from group to group: In some areas, for instance, chimpanzees dip for ants with a long stick, swipe the ants into a ball, and then flick the ball into their mouths. At other sites they use a short stick and slurp the ants with their tongues. Some chimpanzees clip the edges of leaves as a display; others use the leaves as napkins. Perusing the total list is a bit like thumbing through a Fodor’s travel guide. And that is exactly the point. Chimpanzees, Whiten and his colleagues concluded, have culture.

Full text of this article appears in Discover magazine.





Visitors to the Web site of the Jane Goodall Institute for Wildlife Research (www.janegoodall.org) can learn all about Goodall's life, work, and current projects.
London's Royal Society, the United Kingdom's national academy of science, will chart the 39 cultural behaviors chronicled by Whiten and his colleagues--and test visitors to see how they measure up--at its Annual Summer Science Exhibition, June 20 through 22, 6 Carlton House Terrace, London SW 1Y 5AG; admission free; www.royalsoc.ac.uk.