About Chimpanzees
Chimp Behaviour
Tool Use
One day in October of 1960, Jane Goodall found a chimp that she had named David Greybeard squatting on a termite mound. Not wanting to startle him, she stopped some distance away , although she could not see clearly what he was doing. He seemed to be poking pieces of grass into the mound, and then raising them to his mouth. When he left, she approached the mound. She inserted one of the abandoned grasses into a hole in the mound and found that the termites bit onto it with their jaws. David had been using the stem as a tool to "fish" for insects!
Soon after this discovery, Jane observed David and other chimps picking leafy twigs then stripping the leaves so that the twig was a suitable tool for poking into the termite mound. This was modification of an object for a specific purpose, the making of a crude–but effective–tool. Until that time scientists had thought that only humans used and made tools; it was considered the defining characteristic that separated us from other animals. Our species was defined as "Man the Tool Maker." When Louis Leakey received an excited telegram from Jane describing her discoveries he made his now famous response: "Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as humans."
Eventually it was discovered that the Gombe chimpanzees use objects–stems, twigs, branches, leaves, and rocks–in nine different ways to accomplish tasks associated with feeding, drinking, cleaning themselves, investigating out-of-reach objects, and as weapons. In communities outside Gombe, chimpanzees use objects for different purposes. These behaviours, passed from one generation to the next through observational learning, can be regarded as primitive cultures.
