National Geographic: The New Chimpanzees (1995) Movie Script
"THE NEW CHIMPANZEES"
Chimpanzees.
So like us,
we are both captivated and repelled.
As we move through the looking glass
into their world we are transformed.
Chimpanzees,
our forest-dwelling counterparts,
unite us with the rest of nature.
Eerily, they recall our
prehistoric ancestors.
Their social life reflects ours, too.
With paramilitary patrols
political struggles for power
and gain even outright wars.
The tender affection they show
for one another
their gestures and expressions
all seem strangely familiar.
Their invention of
tools forced us to redefine
what sets humanity apart
from the beast.
And now we discover that
chimps developed not only tools,
but entire cultures which they pass on
to their young.
Even medicine seems within their grasp
And when stalked by death,
they seem to feel a sorrow we can share.
With a shiver of recognition,
we glimpse the mind of the chimp
and realize we are not alone.
Come with us on a voyage of discovery,
a journey into our collective past.
We retrace our steps
back into the forest of Africa,
the ancient homeland our species
abandoned some six million years ago.
We left behind, then,
our closest relation the one being
on this planet most like us.
For there is a mind in the forest,
a mind very much like our own,
And it lights the eyes of the chimp.
Chimpanzees share more than 97%
of our genes.
And it shows.
The invention and use of tools
was supposed to set us apart
from the other animals.
But this chimpanzee is "fishing"
for safari ants
with a wand specially selected
and pruned for the task.
Chimps make and use many tools
skills passed on from mother
to child part
of their cultural heritage.
"Ant-fishing" requires real expertise.
Safari ants are a rich food source,
but they pack a vicious bite.
With one fell swoop, they're down.
At eight years of age,
her daughter still has much to learn.
But someday she will master
this technique,
not just by trial and error
but by watching her mother at work.
For the past 35 years,
scientists have been watching
and learning from her mother, as well.
She was an infant herself
when she met her first human being,
who named her Fifi.
That human was Jane Goodall.
Jane came to know Fifi,
her mother Flo
and her entire family quite intimately
Goodall was the first human
to be accepted by wild chimpanzees.
What she discovered revolutionized our
concept of chimps and of ourselves.
All across Africa,
others have followed Goodall's lead.
A second species of chimpanzee
is studied by Takayoshi Kano.
Called bonobos, they're famous
for their human like appearance,
and the way they substitute sex
for violence
unlike the more
aggressive chimp studied
by Goodall and Christophe Boesch.
Boesch has unveiled hunting strategies
and elaborate tool use among rainforest
Chimps leading him to suggest
these things might have evolved
before our forbears left the forest.
And Richard Wrangham believes
he may even have discovered Chimps
practicing a primitive kind
of medicine.
The new research takes us ever
further into the chimp's world,
giving us a new perspective
on our shared legacy.
Chimpanzees and humans sprang
from the same primate stock.
Our paths diverged only
some six million years ago,
with our human forbears moving
onto the plains
leaving the forest to the chimpanzees.
But shared characteristics are written
deep in both our primate souls.
Chimps, too, are capable of
creating distinct cultures.
Various "nations" of chimps cling
to life across the African landscape.
Chimpanzees once thrived throughout
the forests of equatorial Africa,
while bonobos were restricted
to the Congo basin.
Today, both species survive
in isolated fragments,
and are studied at a handful of sites.
Gombe, on the shore of Lake Tanganyika
in Tanzania,
was where Jane Goodall began her
study 35 years ago.
Fifi is the only chimp still alive
from that time
with six surviving offspring.
Freud, her eldest,
is now the dominant male in her group,
while her younger son, Frodo,
is the largest chimp at Gombe and
working his way up the male hierarchy.
Freud now leads the tightly
bonded party of males that
form the core of the group.
Male chimps stay in the group
of their birth,
and cooperate when there
is common cause.
Every week or so,
the males form
a paramilitary patrol to defend
and test the borders
of their territory.
In single file and total silence,
they follow their leader
in search of trespassing neighbors.
Hair standing on end, they listen
for the voices of their foes.
Each community of male chimps
jealously guard their territory
and the females in residence.
A stranger turns and flees.
Though groups of males rarely engage
in battle,
an individual caught
by a border patrol is at serious risk.
In the 1970's, Jane Goodall described
a harrowing chain of events.
Her study group split in two,
and over the course of four years,
the males of one group
systematically hunted down
and brutally killed every adult
in the other group
chilling evidence that warfare
is a painful legacy
from our primate forbears.
Gombe's steep slopes the stage
for all this high drama tumble
from open grassland to riverene forest,
from the top of the Great Rift
to the blue basin of Tanganyika.
Today, a new generation climbs
the path blazed by Jane Goodall.
Charlotte Uhlenbroek
is studying pant hoots,
the long range calls of chimps.
She follows one male all day,
recording the precise time and
circumstances of any pant hoot he makes
Her Tanzanian associate, Issa Salala,
follows another male and does the same
At the end of the day,
they will compare their notes,
to see whether they've witnessed
two sides of a conversation,
and to try and decipher its meaning.
The pant hoots are certainly
conveying some meaning.
Um, what, what I'm trying
to find out is exactly
how specific are the meanings
of these different calls.
I mean, um, does a particular pant-hoot
convey something about a food source?
Does it say, Come here boys?
Does it say I'll meet you up
in the next valley?
Or are they directed at family members
at allies, at friends?
Or are they just, generally, Anyone
that can hear me, this is my message?
We haven't got our ears tuned in.
I mean, it's like different
cultures very often,
it's difficult to hear a slightly
different, uh, pronunciation.
So, certainly, we're not hearing all
the difference out of these.
Sometimes, there's still just a
cacophony of screams out there and you
very hard push to pull them apart;
but, I'm sure the chimps can,
I'm sure they,
they know exactly what's going on.
Sometimes words won't suffice.
Males perform displays dramatic
performances designed to establish
their dominance and intimidate rivals.
Fearless, Frodo sometimes
uses the human researchers
to enhance his displays.
Even Charlotte has fallen prey.
He'll give me a whack.
He'll just, just kind of add
a little flourish,
by incorporating me,
but it's not directed at me.
He, if he wants to hurt somebody,
he could have done it.
Females and their young are dominated
by this threat of force.
But when the fruit crop is ample,
everyone feasts.
A mother's care is the primary
influence on a young chimp's life.
Orphans find life hard.
Mel was orphaned
at the tender age of three.
Only the generosity of
others has allowed him to survive
for six more years.
Still, he seems to miss
the affection he
would have known within his mother's
arms something this little baby
seems to understand.
A temporary respite
from a life of loneliness.
Beyond the bond between mother
and child,
political relationships
are the life's blood of chimp society.
Even while relaxing,
chimps are jockeying for status.
Grooming is, quite literally,
currying favor.
Alliances become apparent
by observing who grooms whom.
Dominant animals and
their allies get the best pickings.
Food is a precious commodity.
They often compress fruit
into a pulpy "wodge,"
something like a tobacco chaw,
to extract every last drop of juice.
But the calls of colobus monkeys
whet another appetite
not so easily satisfied.
When a monkey troop is spotted nearby,
the most avid hunter recruits other
males to join forces in a hunting party
Red colobus monkeys nervously watch
the gathering of bodies below.
Craig Stanford studies the relationship
between colobus and chimps.
He hopes to shed light on the origins
of human hunting.
We know that, at some point early
in human evolution,
meat became an important part
of the diet.
We don't understand exactly
how that happened
was it scavenging meat or hunting meat
Well, we know that the earliest stage
of human evolution happened
in a habitat just like this.
East African woodland that's got
open areas
onto which our ancestors eventually
moved and adapted to.
So, to be able to study hunting here
is the best way
to give us some kind of window
onto the earliest origins
of meat eating in our ancestors,
four or more million years ago.
Frodo is the best of the Gombe hunters
He's 17 years old and yet he's killed
in the last three years.
It's really quite an incredible animal
and a great hunter.
That was Frodo.
All the hunters, including Frodo,
will try to catch a monkey for himself
By joining forces, the chimps hope
to strand some monkeys
in an isolated treetop,
with no route of escape except
into the clutches of a chimp.
Although we see elements
of cooperation at Gombe,
what we thing we're seeing mainly
is individual,
selfish behavior by male hunters,
done within a communal setting.
It's a little bit like a baseball game
in that baseball is a communal game
in which individual players are
doing their piece and in the end,
the end result is going
to be success or a failure.
The more hunters there are,
the greater the odds
of success and, yet,
each individual hunter
is performing selfishly.
As the chimps climb up,
the colobus retreat to
the highest branches
too slender to bear a chimp's weight.
The male colobus stand their
ground against chimps up
to four times their size.
They will even take the offensive
momentarily driving the chimps back.
Holding his tail out of
the chimp's reach,
this male buys precious time for
the escape of the females and young.
Excited by the cries of hunter
and prey, females appear below.
Eighty feet above the ground,
Frodo displays his daring technique.
But this time, he misses.
With chimps climbing everywhere,
one monkey leaps
into the arms of death.
Even a rear attack by
the defending colobus cannot save him.
The young hunter displays
with his kill,
but his triumph is short liver.
Freud simply confiscates the carcass.
Freud settles down to share
with his allies.
Meat is a valuable currency
, a payment for favors.
Females come begging for a taste.
The orphan, Mel, searches for scraps
but he's soon sent packing.
Frodo, frustrated and hungry,
tries to muscle his way
to a place at the table.
But Freud will have none of
it leaving Frodo to rage.
His friends rush in to placate him
to little effect.
With up to 11 males hunting together,
multiple kills are common at Gombe.
As many as seven monkeys
have been taken on a single hunt.
Chimps like a little salad
with their entree.
They often eat leaves
when they eat meat,
sometimes eating kinds
they never touch otherwise.
On average, the Gombe chimps consume
in their range each year.
A taste for meat begins early.
The free for all approach to
hunting works well in Gombe's low
and relatively open woodland.
Catching monkeys high in the treetops
requires a different strategy elsewhere
Christophe Boesch studies chimps
in the Tai forest of the Cote d'Ivoire
prime African rainforest.
Most chimps live in green
and shadowy depths like these.
The forest canopy an interwoven web
floats over a hundred feet above its
reflection in tea colored pools below.
Following his chimps,
he's discovered that they're capable of
an extraordinary level of cooperation.
I mean, the chimps of the Tai forest
or the tropical rainforest.
The canopy layer is continuous,
the biggest mammal they hunt,
the red colobus, they are about
a third the weight of the chimps,
what means that when colobus sit
on a thin branch,
the chimps can't go there,
if he go there,
he fall down on the ground.
So, there is a big problem,
they have to use,
solve it and the only way to
solve it here is by hunting in group.
So that a chimp will drive
the prey away in a given direction,
so that the colobus are constantly
moving in this direction,
and the driver is really just
pushing them in a direction,
he's not trying to capture them,
that is, he's not running,
you see that he's just walking
in a constant direction.
This gives them the constant direction
of flight,
where the chimps on the ground can
then organize them and,
if they see that the group splits
too much in different directions,
you would have blockers,
individuals that come up in specific
trees where colobus might escape,
sort of keep them
in constant direction.
And so that, gives them the possibility
for them to make the kind of a trap.
So that, by having a driver behind,
some blockers on the side,
they just need somebody actually
to come in front of them,
ahead of the movement, and to
then close the trap, if you want.
Only the most experienced hunters play
this role.
They have to race ahead then climb
almost a hundred feet above the canopy
into the crowns of the tallest trees
to ambush their prey.
And when they are
successful it's incredible
because you can have suddenly
all the forest is screaming.
All the chimps know
there have been a capture.
The chimps have made a capture call,
everybody knows 'meat'
that meat is so rare,
it's so difficult to acquire
and it's only because, uh,
adult males have worked together
that there is meat,
so it's something very special
for all group members
and there is a huge excitement
with that.
It's really a, a team work and it
works only if the team wants to work
and the team doesn't see each other,
it's too dense in this forest.
So, they are always anticipating
that the other one will come
and often they don't see if
they really did their job
and it works only
if everybody does their job.
This kind of work, on the long run,
only if meat is shared
according to the work
these hunters have been doing
You see, alpha male is not
the best hunter or is not hunting
and he doesn't get meat.
You have now an alpha male
who's fresh in this position,
that is young and he's not
always hunting
and he can really be there displaying
for minutes and not get
a tiny piece nothing at all.
This division of the spoils based
on right rather than might
reveals a different division of power.
Females, who are allies of the hunters
also gain access to the carcass
bringing their infants closer to the
meat than the blustering alpha male.
If this complex division of labor
and food seems almost human,
so does the chimp's love of play.
An infant chimp may seem secure
within the bosom of his group,
but this is not always true.
A male has stolen a baby chimp
from its frantic mother,
who follows in desperate pursuit.
In the Mahale Mountains,
south of Gombe,
researchers have recorded
this terrible event not once
but seven times and
are at a loss to explain it.
The alpha male is now in possession
of the screaming infant.
He actually beats back the mother
with her own baby.
Both mother and baby are members
of this male's group,
and the infant was presumably sired
by one of the group's members.
Males have been known to
kill babies sired by outsiders,
but this kidnapper could very well be
the baby's father.
The infant is killed by
a savage bite to the face.
Group members share in the macabre
feast just as if it were a monkey.
Infanticide and cannibalism
dark reflections of our common legacy.
But the mirror of our primal past
reflects light amidst the dark.
Aggressive impulses may be rooted
in our distant ancestry,
but so is our capacity
for peaceful coexistence.
It is in Africa's dark heart
the Congo basin that we find a gentler
tributary of our primate legacy.
Takayoshi Kano has led
the research here in Wamba,
Zaire, for the past 22 years.
He comes here in search of the second,
little known species of chimpanzee.
Sugarcane is a sweet lure used
to call down the elusive bonobo.
Dr. Kano, and his
associate Chie Hashimoto,
have discovered that bonobos
are quite distinct
from the chimps studied
by Goodall and Boesch.
At first glance they are different.
Although they've been called
pygmy chimps,
they're not smaller,
just more slightly built.
Hunted elsewhere in Zaire,
they're safe here but wary still.
The sugarcane buffet
proves irresistible.
At ease on two legs,
as well as on four,
they simply rise up and walk
so their hands are free
to carry the cane.
Eerily, their long,
shapely limbs and upright gait recall
our own prehistoric forbears.
And their natural two-legged gait
is only the first surprise they have
in store for us.
An impressively stern female enters
and snaps a young sapling.
Once she picks herself up,
she does something entirely surprising
for a female chimp.
She displays!
And the males give her sway.
For this is the confident stride
of the group's leader,
its alpha female,
whom Kano has named Haru.
Females play a very different role
in bonobo society than they
do among chimps.
The reins of power are shared equally
between male and female held
by a strongly bonded group of high
ranking mothers and their adult sons.
The son of a dominant female can take
great liberties.
High-ranking females cooperate
to dominate adult males
and support their sons
in social conflicts.
Though tough with other adults,
bonobo mothers almost never discipline
their babies even
when they steal the food right our
of their mouths.
Haku, an 11 year old adolescent male,
has lost the loving attention
of his mother.
As an orphan,
he has been forced out,
to the very fringes of his own community.
He's old enough now to begin
to make his mark but,
without a mother's help,
his chance of success is nil.
Males stay with their mothers
for their entire lives,
and rely upon their backing.
With no mother to back him up,
Haku must be wary of Ten,
the alpha male.
Ten was just about Haku's age
when he first rose to power.
Lately, Haku has begun trying
to assert himself.
But Ten had an advantage.
His mother was
the alpha female before Haru,
and he rose to power
on her apron strings.
He will not tolerate any display
from this "motherless child."
Haku has spirit but to no avail.
Ten's annoyance with this upstart
is soothed by one of the other high
ranking males in a surprising way.
Instead of fighting,
bonobos use sex to defuse aggression
in this genuine "make love,
not war" society.
Bonobos have largely divorced sex
from its reproductive role.
Sex is used by all bonobos,
regardless of gender or age,
to form bonds and mitigate tension.
So Haku is not likely
to suffer physical harm.
But without family backing,
his bid for status is probably doomed.
Adolescent females must face
a still greater challenge.
They leave the group of their birth,
and visit neighboring groups in search
of a new home for the rest
of their lives.
This female, called Shin,
has chosen Dr. Kano's group,
but she must first pass muster
with the formidable Haru.
Female bonobos also use sex to forge
strategic alliances with each other.
The males, including Ten,
readily mate with Shin.
But Shin must still win the approval
of Haru and the other females.
Finally, Shin is embraced
by a high-ranking female,
who will act as her sponsor
to the group.
Shin settles down to enjoy
the sugarcane within the circle
of her new community.
With equality between the sexes and
the substitution of sex for violence,
the social lives of bonobos
are very different
from that of
their sibling species the chimp.
While chimps may wage war.
The gentle lives of bonobos show
that violence,
although part of our primate
inheritance, is not inevitable.
Their social lives are fascinating
yet it is the mystery and
potential of the chimpanzees' inner
minds that intrigues us most.
How deep is the mind of the chimp?
Christophe and Hedwige Boesch
have been mapping the chimpanzee mind
through an extraordinary kind
of tool use.
There was this great day,
it was beginning of December
in seventy-nine.
I was following chimps
through unknown lands,
I didn't know where I was anymore,
they were drumming, screaming,
I followed with my compass, behind.
And, suddenly,
there was great excitement
and I was hiding under some vegetation
and there was a clearing
in front of me with a big tree,
big branch sticking out
and I heard some banging so I
approached without making a slightest noise
and I hear the chimps coming,
they passed me,
I could fee their warmth,
I could smell them,
they all started climbing up these
trees with big tools in their hands
and banging on something
which I finally realized
they were cracking nuts.
The sight is unforgettable something
of prehistoric times,
the image of these great animals
using these big tools.
To crack nuts,
the chimps seem to have grasped
the concepts of hammer and anvil.
The anvil is a tree root; the hammer,
a wooden club,
or sometimes even a stone.
Although it may seem effortless,
it takes a decade of practice before
the chimps develop real expertise.
When you look at these images
of chimps cracking nuts,
it looks terribly easy and people
don't realize how difficult it is.
I made an experiment:
I asked a primatologist
who came to visit me here,
I gave him some nuts and a nice place
in the forest and I told him,
yeah, crack some nuts now.
You will see how easy it really is.
It took him 25 minutes
to open the first nut.
He took him 40 minutes
to eat three nuts.
And you can imagine,
if you really have to fight 40 minutes
for three nuts it's not worth it.
I remember the very first time
I saw a female mother
who was looking at her five year old
trying to crack a nut
and she was fighting with a very,
very strange formed club and she was
changing her position all the time
and changing the grip of the hammer
and didn't succeed.
And she was starting to whimper,
not knowing what to do.
And then the mother came,
the infant immediately stepped
a bit backward
and the mother took the hammer
and in a very slow motion move,
she turned the hammer
and just the move,
this turning the hammer,
took her a whole minute,
so it was even slower than I did,
and as to emphasize,
that's the way you should hold
the hammer
and she cracked for some nuts for her
and then left and
the infant tried again
with exactly the same grip
as the mother.
She still had some trouble to crack
the nuts so she changed position,
changed the place of the hammer,
but kept all the time exactly the
same grip as the mother showed her.
So, that's really correcting an error
in an infant
which is really the highest
form we would consider
of active teaching
and that just was kind of a surprise
for the first observation in animal,
for the animal doing that.
A young chimp's tutor is its mother,
who teaches it most of the skills it
needs to survive.
The Boesch's research has shown
that female chimps are the most expert
and dedicated tool users,
which may shed some light
onto the origins
of tool use among our own ancestors.
Already here we have a slight sexual
difference in favor of females
in that they crack more then males.
Another technique to crack nuts up
in the trees is much more often done
by females and they have to anticipate
bring the hammer up on a branch
in the tree and then they have to
handle it up there,
hold the nuts in a fruit in the hand,
hold the hammer,
hold the baby and still crack somehow
and eat these nuts.
And then we have a nut species Panda
nuts, very hard,
you need stone tools to open it.
Stones are a rarity in the forest,
again, this technique is
more often done by females.
It could make you think
that maybe tool use
in our ancestors was also
a female activity
and the first tool users and tool
invertors may well have been females.
Females also transport learned skills
between chimp communities
when they move from group to group
at adolescence.
But, sadly, as chimp populations
become increasingly isolated this kind
of cultural exchange
will come to an end.
Only recently have researchers
all across Africa
realized that some of the differences
between their study groups were
cultural due to the invention
and passing along of learned traditions.
In the Kibale Forest of Uganda,
Richard Wrangham has found that
it is culture
which enables some chimps
to eat foods others must forgo.
So, here we got a safari ant nest
and in five years
we have clear evidence
that the chimps here
do not every eat these,
but in Tai and in Gombe
this is what they do.
A wand onto the nest
and then sweep the ants up,
biting, no neat test,
you've got to be pretty quick and
you've got to know what you're doing.
Now, having just tasted them,
I can understand
why chimps like to eat them,
but, on the whole,
I'd prefer not to, myself.
Every chimp group has
its own unique tool kit.
Only at some locations
have they learned to use wands
to capture ants or termites.
At Tai, they use bone picks
to dig out the marrow,
just as our earliest ancestors did.
They will also use a wodge
of fruit as a sponge,
to help squeeze out every trace
of sweetness from the pulp.
While at Gombe, as well as at Tai,
chewed leaves make a sponge to quench
the thirst at shallow puddles.
We have only begun to realize the depth
of the traditional knowledge generated
by the various "nations" of chimps.
One puzzling cultural practice is the
eating of hairy and unpalatable leaves
They ball them up in their mouths,
forcing them down whole.
Well, here I've got one of the leaves
that is swallowed hole by chimpanzees.
This particular one is the one
that the chimpanzees tend to swallow,
at dawn,
why they do it at dawn is not certain.
Well, one possibility is
they're helping to remove worms.
This is so new that we don't even know
the name of this.
We think it's part of a tape worm
and it looks as though,
when the chimpanzees
have this tapeworm,
they swallow the leaves
in order to expel the tapeworm.
Scientists are now searching
for drugs among the plants
they believe chimps take as medicine.
We have long tested human drugs
on chimps
someday we may test drugs discovered
by chimps on ourselves.
Chimpanzee cultures also
mold their methods of communication.
Besides their calls,
they use a symbolic language
of gesture.
Some gestures we hold in common a
kiss soothes a little domestic discord.
Others we seem to recognize
two males clasp hands
and raise their arms in a salute
as they begin to groom one another.
Other gestures, such a leaf grooming,
we are only beginning to decipher.
When a chimp wants to be groomed,
they pick a leaf and just,
uh, run the thumbs over it,
sometimes bring a mouth to it
and then drop it.
What does this mean?
Well, in functional terms,
it means nothing,
but it's a symbol.
It's a symbol for the chimps.
What it means to them is
I would like to be groomed
or sometimes it means I'm interested
in you.
If these gestures are truly cultural,
we should be able to see them evolve
as fashions change.
Christopher Boesch believes he has.
Leaf-clipping is a behavior
where they take a leaf,
makes a specific sound
and in Tai they do it
before displaying.
The interesting thing is that,
two years ago,
chimps in Tai started for
the very first time to leaf clip
when they were making a resting period
They were asleep,
they would change position,
would do some leaf clipping,
and sleep again.
A new context of use.
And, interestingly
the individuals have started
to use the leaf clipping
in this new context were younger
or were females.
There is much we could learn
from the chimps,
but we are running our of time.
Poaching for meat and
the logging of forests
are driving them towards extinction.
Today, Jane Goodall is fighting
to save them and their heritage.
We're finding that across Africa
where different researchers are
studying different chimpanzee groups,
there are different traditions,
different cultures
and the tragedy here is that the
chimpanzees are disappearing so fast,
not only, eh, is it sad
that the individuals are going,
but their whole cultures are going, too
and that's the area where
we have most yet to learn.
The group studied by Christophe Boesch
is disappearing fast.
The cause is a mystery.
Only rarely does he find any evidence
of their passing.
It's only in one of
the oldest female we had.
And she was found by the
group actually dead on the floor
with her last baby dead and the oldest
juvenile sitting nearby watching.
The losses are tragic for the species,
and for all involved.
I have lost, in the last six years,
about half of the chimps.
There were 80,
there are now only 40 left.
So, it's a dramatic reduction and,
but for us it's depressing, yeah, sure
Predation and disease
have always taken their toll,
but death at the hand of man
may prove too much to bear.
We have some clear proof that poachers
are killing chimps here in our group.
And I have the feeling that the toll
they pay to poachers is just too much
and it's this part which is the causes
of the decline of the population and,
if that is true,
it's very worrying not only
for the study group
but for all the chimps in this park.
Each death is felt dearly.
Yet it is when chimps are forced
to confront death,
that we seem to catch a glimmer
of the chimpanzee soul.
What is striking is
that they feel compassion.
I mean, they really feel the
individual has something not normal
and that they need help.
In one case, I observed a fresh
juvenile being killed by a leopard.
So, you have an individual that looks
actually very similar to a wounded one
but he's dead
and it was very surprising
to notice that the chimps reacted
totally differently,
as if they knew this individual
is not just injured,
this individual is dead.
And all the adult males stayed around
the body for all this time,
groomed it a lot what they would
never do with a live juvenile
and, in a kind of a way,
asked for the other group members
to show respect for the dead.
And the only young that was authorized
to come to the body was
the younger brother of the dead.
So, yeah, it makes you think
what they feel
and how they understand.
We can only guess what this female,
called Castor,
understands about her own tragedy.
Her infant is mortally ill.
Since her baby is too feeble
to cling to her,
she resorts to carrying it
with her foot as she climbs
in search of the food she needs
to survive.
Still the baby clings to life.
How do we really realize
that somebody's dead?
How would we realize if we didn't have
all the science and all these things.
So, I think, in a way,
they certainly know
that something, special is happening
that they would like
to fight against it,
but that they can't and
they realize it after a while.
Finally, the emaciated
form of her infant lies deathly still.
Then with a gesture so human it's
painful to watch,
she seems to bid her baby farewell
with a kiss.
If chimps share with us the emotions
that bring us to tears,
perhaps they share others, as well.
Jane Goodall wonders.
Do chimpanzees feel perhaps
a sense of awe,
similar to that which must have lead
to the first religions of
our ancestors worship of fire, of sun,
of rain, worship of rushing water
that is always coming,
always going, yet always here?
Face to face with
our nearest relations.
Our mutual family history
is glorious and tender,
brutal and shocking.
As humans, though, we are distinct,
and must choose how our own nature
is expressed.
But it's clear that, for good or ill,
we are part of nature
just another of its promising
but flawed creations.
Through the study of the chimps,
science,
which once strove to set us apart
from the rest of nature,
has now brought us back within its fold
discovering this mind in the forest.
What grabs you is when
you feel that there's an animal out
there that has a human like mind
that can solve problems,
that has extraordinary
social relations
and has got this beginnings
of the diversity of culture.
It's when we see into the mind of the
chimps that we get that strange tingle
What it means in a deep way
is that as long as these
chimpanzees are surviving,
humans are in touch
with their ancestry
and we know we're not completely alone
Chimpanzees.
So like us,
we are both captivated and repelled.
As we move through the looking glass
into their world we are transformed.
Chimpanzees,
our forest-dwelling counterparts,
unite us with the rest of nature.
Eerily, they recall our
prehistoric ancestors.
Their social life reflects ours, too.
With paramilitary patrols
political struggles for power
and gain even outright wars.
The tender affection they show
for one another
their gestures and expressions
all seem strangely familiar.
Their invention of
tools forced us to redefine
what sets humanity apart
from the beast.
And now we discover that
chimps developed not only tools,
but entire cultures which they pass on
to their young.
Even medicine seems within their grasp
And when stalked by death,
they seem to feel a sorrow we can share.
With a shiver of recognition,
we glimpse the mind of the chimp
and realize we are not alone.
Come with us on a voyage of discovery,
a journey into our collective past.
We retrace our steps
back into the forest of Africa,
the ancient homeland our species
abandoned some six million years ago.
We left behind, then,
our closest relation the one being
on this planet most like us.
For there is a mind in the forest,
a mind very much like our own,
And it lights the eyes of the chimp.
Chimpanzees share more than 97%
of our genes.
And it shows.
The invention and use of tools
was supposed to set us apart
from the other animals.
But this chimpanzee is "fishing"
for safari ants
with a wand specially selected
and pruned for the task.
Chimps make and use many tools
skills passed on from mother
to child part
of their cultural heritage.
"Ant-fishing" requires real expertise.
Safari ants are a rich food source,
but they pack a vicious bite.
With one fell swoop, they're down.
At eight years of age,
her daughter still has much to learn.
But someday she will master
this technique,
not just by trial and error
but by watching her mother at work.
For the past 35 years,
scientists have been watching
and learning from her mother, as well.
She was an infant herself
when she met her first human being,
who named her Fifi.
That human was Jane Goodall.
Jane came to know Fifi,
her mother Flo
and her entire family quite intimately
Goodall was the first human
to be accepted by wild chimpanzees.
What she discovered revolutionized our
concept of chimps and of ourselves.
All across Africa,
others have followed Goodall's lead.
A second species of chimpanzee
is studied by Takayoshi Kano.
Called bonobos, they're famous
for their human like appearance,
and the way they substitute sex
for violence
unlike the more
aggressive chimp studied
by Goodall and Christophe Boesch.
Boesch has unveiled hunting strategies
and elaborate tool use among rainforest
Chimps leading him to suggest
these things might have evolved
before our forbears left the forest.
And Richard Wrangham believes
he may even have discovered Chimps
practicing a primitive kind
of medicine.
The new research takes us ever
further into the chimp's world,
giving us a new perspective
on our shared legacy.
Chimpanzees and humans sprang
from the same primate stock.
Our paths diverged only
some six million years ago,
with our human forbears moving
onto the plains
leaving the forest to the chimpanzees.
But shared characteristics are written
deep in both our primate souls.
Chimps, too, are capable of
creating distinct cultures.
Various "nations" of chimps cling
to life across the African landscape.
Chimpanzees once thrived throughout
the forests of equatorial Africa,
while bonobos were restricted
to the Congo basin.
Today, both species survive
in isolated fragments,
and are studied at a handful of sites.
Gombe, on the shore of Lake Tanganyika
in Tanzania,
was where Jane Goodall began her
study 35 years ago.
Fifi is the only chimp still alive
from that time
with six surviving offspring.
Freud, her eldest,
is now the dominant male in her group,
while her younger son, Frodo,
is the largest chimp at Gombe and
working his way up the male hierarchy.
Freud now leads the tightly
bonded party of males that
form the core of the group.
Male chimps stay in the group
of their birth,
and cooperate when there
is common cause.
Every week or so,
the males form
a paramilitary patrol to defend
and test the borders
of their territory.
In single file and total silence,
they follow their leader
in search of trespassing neighbors.
Hair standing on end, they listen
for the voices of their foes.
Each community of male chimps
jealously guard their territory
and the females in residence.
A stranger turns and flees.
Though groups of males rarely engage
in battle,
an individual caught
by a border patrol is at serious risk.
In the 1970's, Jane Goodall described
a harrowing chain of events.
Her study group split in two,
and over the course of four years,
the males of one group
systematically hunted down
and brutally killed every adult
in the other group
chilling evidence that warfare
is a painful legacy
from our primate forbears.
Gombe's steep slopes the stage
for all this high drama tumble
from open grassland to riverene forest,
from the top of the Great Rift
to the blue basin of Tanganyika.
Today, a new generation climbs
the path blazed by Jane Goodall.
Charlotte Uhlenbroek
is studying pant hoots,
the long range calls of chimps.
She follows one male all day,
recording the precise time and
circumstances of any pant hoot he makes
Her Tanzanian associate, Issa Salala,
follows another male and does the same
At the end of the day,
they will compare their notes,
to see whether they've witnessed
two sides of a conversation,
and to try and decipher its meaning.
The pant hoots are certainly
conveying some meaning.
Um, what, what I'm trying
to find out is exactly
how specific are the meanings
of these different calls.
I mean, um, does a particular pant-hoot
convey something about a food source?
Does it say, Come here boys?
Does it say I'll meet you up
in the next valley?
Or are they directed at family members
at allies, at friends?
Or are they just, generally, Anyone
that can hear me, this is my message?
We haven't got our ears tuned in.
I mean, it's like different
cultures very often,
it's difficult to hear a slightly
different, uh, pronunciation.
So, certainly, we're not hearing all
the difference out of these.
Sometimes, there's still just a
cacophony of screams out there and you
very hard push to pull them apart;
but, I'm sure the chimps can,
I'm sure they,
they know exactly what's going on.
Sometimes words won't suffice.
Males perform displays dramatic
performances designed to establish
their dominance and intimidate rivals.
Fearless, Frodo sometimes
uses the human researchers
to enhance his displays.
Even Charlotte has fallen prey.
He'll give me a whack.
He'll just, just kind of add
a little flourish,
by incorporating me,
but it's not directed at me.
He, if he wants to hurt somebody,
he could have done it.
Females and their young are dominated
by this threat of force.
But when the fruit crop is ample,
everyone feasts.
A mother's care is the primary
influence on a young chimp's life.
Orphans find life hard.
Mel was orphaned
at the tender age of three.
Only the generosity of
others has allowed him to survive
for six more years.
Still, he seems to miss
the affection he
would have known within his mother's
arms something this little baby
seems to understand.
A temporary respite
from a life of loneliness.
Beyond the bond between mother
and child,
political relationships
are the life's blood of chimp society.
Even while relaxing,
chimps are jockeying for status.
Grooming is, quite literally,
currying favor.
Alliances become apparent
by observing who grooms whom.
Dominant animals and
their allies get the best pickings.
Food is a precious commodity.
They often compress fruit
into a pulpy "wodge,"
something like a tobacco chaw,
to extract every last drop of juice.
But the calls of colobus monkeys
whet another appetite
not so easily satisfied.
When a monkey troop is spotted nearby,
the most avid hunter recruits other
males to join forces in a hunting party
Red colobus monkeys nervously watch
the gathering of bodies below.
Craig Stanford studies the relationship
between colobus and chimps.
He hopes to shed light on the origins
of human hunting.
We know that, at some point early
in human evolution,
meat became an important part
of the diet.
We don't understand exactly
how that happened
was it scavenging meat or hunting meat
Well, we know that the earliest stage
of human evolution happened
in a habitat just like this.
East African woodland that's got
open areas
onto which our ancestors eventually
moved and adapted to.
So, to be able to study hunting here
is the best way
to give us some kind of window
onto the earliest origins
of meat eating in our ancestors,
four or more million years ago.
Frodo is the best of the Gombe hunters
He's 17 years old and yet he's killed
in the last three years.
It's really quite an incredible animal
and a great hunter.
That was Frodo.
All the hunters, including Frodo,
will try to catch a monkey for himself
By joining forces, the chimps hope
to strand some monkeys
in an isolated treetop,
with no route of escape except
into the clutches of a chimp.
Although we see elements
of cooperation at Gombe,
what we thing we're seeing mainly
is individual,
selfish behavior by male hunters,
done within a communal setting.
It's a little bit like a baseball game
in that baseball is a communal game
in which individual players are
doing their piece and in the end,
the end result is going
to be success or a failure.
The more hunters there are,
the greater the odds
of success and, yet,
each individual hunter
is performing selfishly.
As the chimps climb up,
the colobus retreat to
the highest branches
too slender to bear a chimp's weight.
The male colobus stand their
ground against chimps up
to four times their size.
They will even take the offensive
momentarily driving the chimps back.
Holding his tail out of
the chimp's reach,
this male buys precious time for
the escape of the females and young.
Excited by the cries of hunter
and prey, females appear below.
Eighty feet above the ground,
Frodo displays his daring technique.
But this time, he misses.
With chimps climbing everywhere,
one monkey leaps
into the arms of death.
Even a rear attack by
the defending colobus cannot save him.
The young hunter displays
with his kill,
but his triumph is short liver.
Freud simply confiscates the carcass.
Freud settles down to share
with his allies.
Meat is a valuable currency
, a payment for favors.
Females come begging for a taste.
The orphan, Mel, searches for scraps
but he's soon sent packing.
Frodo, frustrated and hungry,
tries to muscle his way
to a place at the table.
But Freud will have none of
it leaving Frodo to rage.
His friends rush in to placate him
to little effect.
With up to 11 males hunting together,
multiple kills are common at Gombe.
As many as seven monkeys
have been taken on a single hunt.
Chimps like a little salad
with their entree.
They often eat leaves
when they eat meat,
sometimes eating kinds
they never touch otherwise.
On average, the Gombe chimps consume
in their range each year.
A taste for meat begins early.
The free for all approach to
hunting works well in Gombe's low
and relatively open woodland.
Catching monkeys high in the treetops
requires a different strategy elsewhere
Christophe Boesch studies chimps
in the Tai forest of the Cote d'Ivoire
prime African rainforest.
Most chimps live in green
and shadowy depths like these.
The forest canopy an interwoven web
floats over a hundred feet above its
reflection in tea colored pools below.
Following his chimps,
he's discovered that they're capable of
an extraordinary level of cooperation.
I mean, the chimps of the Tai forest
or the tropical rainforest.
The canopy layer is continuous,
the biggest mammal they hunt,
the red colobus, they are about
a third the weight of the chimps,
what means that when colobus sit
on a thin branch,
the chimps can't go there,
if he go there,
he fall down on the ground.
So, there is a big problem,
they have to use,
solve it and the only way to
solve it here is by hunting in group.
So that a chimp will drive
the prey away in a given direction,
so that the colobus are constantly
moving in this direction,
and the driver is really just
pushing them in a direction,
he's not trying to capture them,
that is, he's not running,
you see that he's just walking
in a constant direction.
This gives them the constant direction
of flight,
where the chimps on the ground can
then organize them and,
if they see that the group splits
too much in different directions,
you would have blockers,
individuals that come up in specific
trees where colobus might escape,
sort of keep them
in constant direction.
And so that, gives them the possibility
for them to make the kind of a trap.
So that, by having a driver behind,
some blockers on the side,
they just need somebody actually
to come in front of them,
ahead of the movement, and to
then close the trap, if you want.
Only the most experienced hunters play
this role.
They have to race ahead then climb
almost a hundred feet above the canopy
into the crowns of the tallest trees
to ambush their prey.
And when they are
successful it's incredible
because you can have suddenly
all the forest is screaming.
All the chimps know
there have been a capture.
The chimps have made a capture call,
everybody knows 'meat'
that meat is so rare,
it's so difficult to acquire
and it's only because, uh,
adult males have worked together
that there is meat,
so it's something very special
for all group members
and there is a huge excitement
with that.
It's really a, a team work and it
works only if the team wants to work
and the team doesn't see each other,
it's too dense in this forest.
So, they are always anticipating
that the other one will come
and often they don't see if
they really did their job
and it works only
if everybody does their job.
This kind of work, on the long run,
only if meat is shared
according to the work
these hunters have been doing
You see, alpha male is not
the best hunter or is not hunting
and he doesn't get meat.
You have now an alpha male
who's fresh in this position,
that is young and he's not
always hunting
and he can really be there displaying
for minutes and not get
a tiny piece nothing at all.
This division of the spoils based
on right rather than might
reveals a different division of power.
Females, who are allies of the hunters
also gain access to the carcass
bringing their infants closer to the
meat than the blustering alpha male.
If this complex division of labor
and food seems almost human,
so does the chimp's love of play.
An infant chimp may seem secure
within the bosom of his group,
but this is not always true.
A male has stolen a baby chimp
from its frantic mother,
who follows in desperate pursuit.
In the Mahale Mountains,
south of Gombe,
researchers have recorded
this terrible event not once
but seven times and
are at a loss to explain it.
The alpha male is now in possession
of the screaming infant.
He actually beats back the mother
with her own baby.
Both mother and baby are members
of this male's group,
and the infant was presumably sired
by one of the group's members.
Males have been known to
kill babies sired by outsiders,
but this kidnapper could very well be
the baby's father.
The infant is killed by
a savage bite to the face.
Group members share in the macabre
feast just as if it were a monkey.
Infanticide and cannibalism
dark reflections of our common legacy.
But the mirror of our primal past
reflects light amidst the dark.
Aggressive impulses may be rooted
in our distant ancestry,
but so is our capacity
for peaceful coexistence.
It is in Africa's dark heart
the Congo basin that we find a gentler
tributary of our primate legacy.
Takayoshi Kano has led
the research here in Wamba,
Zaire, for the past 22 years.
He comes here in search of the second,
little known species of chimpanzee.
Sugarcane is a sweet lure used
to call down the elusive bonobo.
Dr. Kano, and his
associate Chie Hashimoto,
have discovered that bonobos
are quite distinct
from the chimps studied
by Goodall and Boesch.
At first glance they are different.
Although they've been called
pygmy chimps,
they're not smaller,
just more slightly built.
Hunted elsewhere in Zaire,
they're safe here but wary still.
The sugarcane buffet
proves irresistible.
At ease on two legs,
as well as on four,
they simply rise up and walk
so their hands are free
to carry the cane.
Eerily, their long,
shapely limbs and upright gait recall
our own prehistoric forbears.
And their natural two-legged gait
is only the first surprise they have
in store for us.
An impressively stern female enters
and snaps a young sapling.
Once she picks herself up,
she does something entirely surprising
for a female chimp.
She displays!
And the males give her sway.
For this is the confident stride
of the group's leader,
its alpha female,
whom Kano has named Haru.
Females play a very different role
in bonobo society than they
do among chimps.
The reins of power are shared equally
between male and female held
by a strongly bonded group of high
ranking mothers and their adult sons.
The son of a dominant female can take
great liberties.
High-ranking females cooperate
to dominate adult males
and support their sons
in social conflicts.
Though tough with other adults,
bonobo mothers almost never discipline
their babies even
when they steal the food right our
of their mouths.
Haku, an 11 year old adolescent male,
has lost the loving attention
of his mother.
As an orphan,
he has been forced out,
to the very fringes of his own community.
He's old enough now to begin
to make his mark but,
without a mother's help,
his chance of success is nil.
Males stay with their mothers
for their entire lives,
and rely upon their backing.
With no mother to back him up,
Haku must be wary of Ten,
the alpha male.
Ten was just about Haku's age
when he first rose to power.
Lately, Haku has begun trying
to assert himself.
But Ten had an advantage.
His mother was
the alpha female before Haru,
and he rose to power
on her apron strings.
He will not tolerate any display
from this "motherless child."
Haku has spirit but to no avail.
Ten's annoyance with this upstart
is soothed by one of the other high
ranking males in a surprising way.
Instead of fighting,
bonobos use sex to defuse aggression
in this genuine "make love,
not war" society.
Bonobos have largely divorced sex
from its reproductive role.
Sex is used by all bonobos,
regardless of gender or age,
to form bonds and mitigate tension.
So Haku is not likely
to suffer physical harm.
But without family backing,
his bid for status is probably doomed.
Adolescent females must face
a still greater challenge.
They leave the group of their birth,
and visit neighboring groups in search
of a new home for the rest
of their lives.
This female, called Shin,
has chosen Dr. Kano's group,
but she must first pass muster
with the formidable Haru.
Female bonobos also use sex to forge
strategic alliances with each other.
The males, including Ten,
readily mate with Shin.
But Shin must still win the approval
of Haru and the other females.
Finally, Shin is embraced
by a high-ranking female,
who will act as her sponsor
to the group.
Shin settles down to enjoy
the sugarcane within the circle
of her new community.
With equality between the sexes and
the substitution of sex for violence,
the social lives of bonobos
are very different
from that of
their sibling species the chimp.
While chimps may wage war.
The gentle lives of bonobos show
that violence,
although part of our primate
inheritance, is not inevitable.
Their social lives are fascinating
yet it is the mystery and
potential of the chimpanzees' inner
minds that intrigues us most.
How deep is the mind of the chimp?
Christophe and Hedwige Boesch
have been mapping the chimpanzee mind
through an extraordinary kind
of tool use.
There was this great day,
it was beginning of December
in seventy-nine.
I was following chimps
through unknown lands,
I didn't know where I was anymore,
they were drumming, screaming,
I followed with my compass, behind.
And, suddenly,
there was great excitement
and I was hiding under some vegetation
and there was a clearing
in front of me with a big tree,
big branch sticking out
and I heard some banging so I
approached without making a slightest noise
and I hear the chimps coming,
they passed me,
I could fee their warmth,
I could smell them,
they all started climbing up these
trees with big tools in their hands
and banging on something
which I finally realized
they were cracking nuts.
The sight is unforgettable something
of prehistoric times,
the image of these great animals
using these big tools.
To crack nuts,
the chimps seem to have grasped
the concepts of hammer and anvil.
The anvil is a tree root; the hammer,
a wooden club,
or sometimes even a stone.
Although it may seem effortless,
it takes a decade of practice before
the chimps develop real expertise.
When you look at these images
of chimps cracking nuts,
it looks terribly easy and people
don't realize how difficult it is.
I made an experiment:
I asked a primatologist
who came to visit me here,
I gave him some nuts and a nice place
in the forest and I told him,
yeah, crack some nuts now.
You will see how easy it really is.
It took him 25 minutes
to open the first nut.
He took him 40 minutes
to eat three nuts.
And you can imagine,
if you really have to fight 40 minutes
for three nuts it's not worth it.
I remember the very first time
I saw a female mother
who was looking at her five year old
trying to crack a nut
and she was fighting with a very,
very strange formed club and she was
changing her position all the time
and changing the grip of the hammer
and didn't succeed.
And she was starting to whimper,
not knowing what to do.
And then the mother came,
the infant immediately stepped
a bit backward
and the mother took the hammer
and in a very slow motion move,
she turned the hammer
and just the move,
this turning the hammer,
took her a whole minute,
so it was even slower than I did,
and as to emphasize,
that's the way you should hold
the hammer
and she cracked for some nuts for her
and then left and
the infant tried again
with exactly the same grip
as the mother.
She still had some trouble to crack
the nuts so she changed position,
changed the place of the hammer,
but kept all the time exactly the
same grip as the mother showed her.
So, that's really correcting an error
in an infant
which is really the highest
form we would consider
of active teaching
and that just was kind of a surprise
for the first observation in animal,
for the animal doing that.
A young chimp's tutor is its mother,
who teaches it most of the skills it
needs to survive.
The Boesch's research has shown
that female chimps are the most expert
and dedicated tool users,
which may shed some light
onto the origins
of tool use among our own ancestors.
Already here we have a slight sexual
difference in favor of females
in that they crack more then males.
Another technique to crack nuts up
in the trees is much more often done
by females and they have to anticipate
bring the hammer up on a branch
in the tree and then they have to
handle it up there,
hold the nuts in a fruit in the hand,
hold the hammer,
hold the baby and still crack somehow
and eat these nuts.
And then we have a nut species Panda
nuts, very hard,
you need stone tools to open it.
Stones are a rarity in the forest,
again, this technique is
more often done by females.
It could make you think
that maybe tool use
in our ancestors was also
a female activity
and the first tool users and tool
invertors may well have been females.
Females also transport learned skills
between chimp communities
when they move from group to group
at adolescence.
But, sadly, as chimp populations
become increasingly isolated this kind
of cultural exchange
will come to an end.
Only recently have researchers
all across Africa
realized that some of the differences
between their study groups were
cultural due to the invention
and passing along of learned traditions.
In the Kibale Forest of Uganda,
Richard Wrangham has found that
it is culture
which enables some chimps
to eat foods others must forgo.
So, here we got a safari ant nest
and in five years
we have clear evidence
that the chimps here
do not every eat these,
but in Tai and in Gombe
this is what they do.
A wand onto the nest
and then sweep the ants up,
biting, no neat test,
you've got to be pretty quick and
you've got to know what you're doing.
Now, having just tasted them,
I can understand
why chimps like to eat them,
but, on the whole,
I'd prefer not to, myself.
Every chimp group has
its own unique tool kit.
Only at some locations
have they learned to use wands
to capture ants or termites.
At Tai, they use bone picks
to dig out the marrow,
just as our earliest ancestors did.
They will also use a wodge
of fruit as a sponge,
to help squeeze out every trace
of sweetness from the pulp.
While at Gombe, as well as at Tai,
chewed leaves make a sponge to quench
the thirst at shallow puddles.
We have only begun to realize the depth
of the traditional knowledge generated
by the various "nations" of chimps.
One puzzling cultural practice is the
eating of hairy and unpalatable leaves
They ball them up in their mouths,
forcing them down whole.
Well, here I've got one of the leaves
that is swallowed hole by chimpanzees.
This particular one is the one
that the chimpanzees tend to swallow,
at dawn,
why they do it at dawn is not certain.
Well, one possibility is
they're helping to remove worms.
This is so new that we don't even know
the name of this.
We think it's part of a tape worm
and it looks as though,
when the chimpanzees
have this tapeworm,
they swallow the leaves
in order to expel the tapeworm.
Scientists are now searching
for drugs among the plants
they believe chimps take as medicine.
We have long tested human drugs
on chimps
someday we may test drugs discovered
by chimps on ourselves.
Chimpanzee cultures also
mold their methods of communication.
Besides their calls,
they use a symbolic language
of gesture.
Some gestures we hold in common a
kiss soothes a little domestic discord.
Others we seem to recognize
two males clasp hands
and raise their arms in a salute
as they begin to groom one another.
Other gestures, such a leaf grooming,
we are only beginning to decipher.
When a chimp wants to be groomed,
they pick a leaf and just,
uh, run the thumbs over it,
sometimes bring a mouth to it
and then drop it.
What does this mean?
Well, in functional terms,
it means nothing,
but it's a symbol.
It's a symbol for the chimps.
What it means to them is
I would like to be groomed
or sometimes it means I'm interested
in you.
If these gestures are truly cultural,
we should be able to see them evolve
as fashions change.
Christopher Boesch believes he has.
Leaf-clipping is a behavior
where they take a leaf,
makes a specific sound
and in Tai they do it
before displaying.
The interesting thing is that,
two years ago,
chimps in Tai started for
the very first time to leaf clip
when they were making a resting period
They were asleep,
they would change position,
would do some leaf clipping,
and sleep again.
A new context of use.
And, interestingly
the individuals have started
to use the leaf clipping
in this new context were younger
or were females.
There is much we could learn
from the chimps,
but we are running our of time.
Poaching for meat and
the logging of forests
are driving them towards extinction.
Today, Jane Goodall is fighting
to save them and their heritage.
We're finding that across Africa
where different researchers are
studying different chimpanzee groups,
there are different traditions,
different cultures
and the tragedy here is that the
chimpanzees are disappearing so fast,
not only, eh, is it sad
that the individuals are going,
but their whole cultures are going, too
and that's the area where
we have most yet to learn.
The group studied by Christophe Boesch
is disappearing fast.
The cause is a mystery.
Only rarely does he find any evidence
of their passing.
It's only in one of
the oldest female we had.
And she was found by the
group actually dead on the floor
with her last baby dead and the oldest
juvenile sitting nearby watching.
The losses are tragic for the species,
and for all involved.
I have lost, in the last six years,
about half of the chimps.
There were 80,
there are now only 40 left.
So, it's a dramatic reduction and,
but for us it's depressing, yeah, sure
Predation and disease
have always taken their toll,
but death at the hand of man
may prove too much to bear.
We have some clear proof that poachers
are killing chimps here in our group.
And I have the feeling that the toll
they pay to poachers is just too much
and it's this part which is the causes
of the decline of the population and,
if that is true,
it's very worrying not only
for the study group
but for all the chimps in this park.
Each death is felt dearly.
Yet it is when chimps are forced
to confront death,
that we seem to catch a glimmer
of the chimpanzee soul.
What is striking is
that they feel compassion.
I mean, they really feel the
individual has something not normal
and that they need help.
In one case, I observed a fresh
juvenile being killed by a leopard.
So, you have an individual that looks
actually very similar to a wounded one
but he's dead
and it was very surprising
to notice that the chimps reacted
totally differently,
as if they knew this individual
is not just injured,
this individual is dead.
And all the adult males stayed around
the body for all this time,
groomed it a lot what they would
never do with a live juvenile
and, in a kind of a way,
asked for the other group members
to show respect for the dead.
And the only young that was authorized
to come to the body was
the younger brother of the dead.
So, yeah, it makes you think
what they feel
and how they understand.
We can only guess what this female,
called Castor,
understands about her own tragedy.
Her infant is mortally ill.
Since her baby is too feeble
to cling to her,
she resorts to carrying it
with her foot as she climbs
in search of the food she needs
to survive.
Still the baby clings to life.
How do we really realize
that somebody's dead?
How would we realize if we didn't have
all the science and all these things.
So, I think, in a way,
they certainly know
that something, special is happening
that they would like
to fight against it,
but that they can't and
they realize it after a while.
Finally, the emaciated
form of her infant lies deathly still.
Then with a gesture so human it's
painful to watch,
she seems to bid her baby farewell
with a kiss.
If chimps share with us the emotions
that bring us to tears,
perhaps they share others, as well.
Jane Goodall wonders.
Do chimpanzees feel perhaps
a sense of awe,
similar to that which must have lead
to the first religions of
our ancestors worship of fire, of sun,
of rain, worship of rushing water
that is always coming,
always going, yet always here?
Face to face with
our nearest relations.
Our mutual family history
is glorious and tender,
brutal and shocking.
As humans, though, we are distinct,
and must choose how our own nature
is expressed.
But it's clear that, for good or ill,
we are part of nature
just another of its promising
but flawed creations.
Through the study of the chimps,
science,
which once strove to set us apart
from the rest of nature,
has now brought us back within its fold
discovering this mind in the forest.
What grabs you is when
you feel that there's an animal out
there that has a human like mind
that can solve problems,
that has extraordinary
social relations
and has got this beginnings
of the diversity of culture.
It's when we see into the mind of the
chimps that we get that strange tingle
What it means in a deep way
is that as long as these
chimpanzees are surviving,
humans are in touch
with their ancestry
and we know we're not completely alone