In 1960, a young British researcher named Jane Goodall sat quietly in the forests of Gombe, Tanzania, watching a chimpanzee she had named David Greybeard. What she saw that day would overturn one of science’s most fundamental assumptions about what it means to be human.
David Greybeard was making a tool.
Meet the Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes)
The chimpanzee is our closest living relative on Earth — separated from us by just 1.3% of our DNA. That number is so small it still startles scientists who work with it daily. For context, chimpanzees are more closely related to humans than they are to gorillas.
There are four recognised subspecies: the common chimpanzee, the central chimpanzee, the Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee, and the eastern chimpanzee. Together, they range across a broad band of equatorial Africa — from Senegal in the west to Tanzania in the east — inhabiting tropical rainforests, woodland savannas, and montane forests up to 2,800 metres above sea level.
Adult chimpanzees are powerfully built animals. Males typically weigh between 40 and 70 kg and are estimated to be three to five times stronger than an adult human of equivalent size — a fact that makes their gentle social interactions all the more remarkable. Their arms are longer than their legs, perfectly adapted for moving through the forest canopy, and their hands are capable of the same precision grip that allows humans to write, paint, and perform surgery.
Their faces are deeply expressive — capable of conveying fear, joy, curiosity, grief, and affection in ways that are immediately recognisable to any human observer. This is not coincidence. It is shared evolutionary heritage.
The Tool Users That Changed Science
When Jane Goodall reported her observations of chimpanzees using grass stems as tools to extract termites from mounds, her supervisor — the legendary paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey — sent her a now-famous telegram:
“Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.”
In the decades since, researchers have documented an extraordinary range of tool use across chimpanzee populations:
- Termite fishing — stripping twigs and grass stems to extract termites from mounds
- Nut cracking — using stone or wooden hammers and anvils to crack open hard-shelled nuts, a skill that takes young chimpanzees up to ten years to master
- Leaf sponges — chewing leaves into a spongy mass to absorb water from tree hollows that fingers cannot reach
- Spear hunting — in Senegal’s Fongoli community, chimpanzees have been observed fashioning wooden spears and using them to hunt bush babies sleeping in tree cavities — the first documented case of non-human animals crafting weapons for hunting
- Algae scooping — using long sticks to scoop algae from the surface of ponds
- Medicinal plant use — selecting specific plants with known anti-parasitic properties when ill, and applying them in ways that suggest intentional self-medication
What makes this even more remarkable is that tool use varies between chimpanzee communities — different populations have developed different techniques, passed down through generations. This is, by any reasonable definition, culture.
A Society of Politics, Power and Loyalty
Chimpanzees live in communities of 20 to 150 individuals, organised around a complex and constantly shifting dominance hierarchy. At the top sits the alpha male — but unlike many animal societies, chimpanzee alpha status is not simply about physical strength. It is about politics.
An alpha male maintains his position through alliances — carefully cultivated relationships with other males who will support him during confrontations. He grooms his allies, shares food with them, and defends them in conflicts. In return, they back him when his position is challenged. Chimpanzee politics, studied in detail by primatologist Frans de Waal, involves coalition building, strategic betrayal, reconciliation, and long-term planning that mirrors human political behaviour in ways that are deeply unsettling and deeply fascinating in equal measure.
Female chimpanzees have their own social hierarchies, though these are less rigid than male hierarchies. High-ranking females have better access to food and safer ranging areas, and their offspring enjoy higher survival rates. Females are the primary teachers of tool use — young chimpanzees learn by watching their mothers for years before attempting techniques themselves.
Friendships are real and lasting. Chimpanzees form close bonds that persist for decades, grooming each other regularly, sharing food, and coming to each other’s defence. When a close companion dies, chimpanzees have been observed sitting with the body for hours, grooming it, and showing behaviours that researchers cautiously describe as grief.
Communication: On the Edge of Language
Chimpanzees communicate through a rich system of vocalisations, gestures, and facial expressions. Their repertoire includes:
- Pant-hoots — long-distance calls that identify individuals and coordinate group movement, audible up to 2 km away
- Screams — distress calls that immediately mobilise nearby community members
- Grunts and whimpers — close-range social calls conveying a range of emotional states
- Laughter — yes, chimpanzees laugh. It sounds different from human laughter — more breathy and rapid — but it occurs in the same social contexts: play, tickling, and moments of excitement
In captivity, chimpanzees have been taught American Sign Language and have demonstrated the ability to learn hundreds of signs, combine them in novel ways, and even teach signs to their offspring without human prompting. The debate about whether this constitutes true language continues — but the cognitive capacity it reveals is extraordinary.
Hunters and the Complexity of Chimpanzee Morality
Chimpanzees are not gentle vegetarians. They are active, cooperative hunters — and their prey of choice is often other primates, particularly red colobus monkeys.
A chimpanzee hunt is a coordinated, strategic affair. Different individuals take on different roles — drivers, blockers, chasers, and ambushers — working together to cut off escape routes and corner their prey. Successful hunters share meat with allies, using it as a social currency to reinforce bonds and reward cooperation.
This hunting behaviour raises profound questions. Chimpanzees show clear signs of empathy — they comfort distressed companions, adopt orphaned infants, and reconcile after conflicts. Yet they also conduct lethal raids on neighbouring communities, killing rivals in coordinated attacks that researchers have compared to primitive warfare.
The chimpanzee does not fit neatly into any simple moral category. It is, in this way, very much like us.
The Crisis: A Species Running Out of Time
Chimpanzees are classified as Endangered on the IUCN Red List. From an estimated one million individuals a century ago, the total wild population has collapsed to between 170,000 and 300,000 — and continues to decline.
The threats are severe and interconnected:
- Habitat destruction — deforestation for agriculture, logging, and mining has eliminated vast areas of chimpanzee habitat across West and Central Africa
- Bushmeat hunting — chimpanzees are hunted for food across much of their range, with infants often taken alive for the illegal pet trade after their mothers are killed
- Disease — chimpanzees are susceptible to many human diseases, including respiratory viruses that can devastate communities. Ebola has killed thousands of chimpanzees in Central Africa
- Human-wildlife conflict — as forests shrink, chimpanzees increasingly raid crops, leading to retaliatory killing by farmers
The Nigeria-Cameroon subspecies is the most critically endangered, with fewer than 6,000 individuals remaining.
What Jane Goodall Started — and What Must Continue
Jane Goodall’s 60+ years of research at Gombe have given us an unparalleled window into chimpanzee life. But her work has also made her one of the world’s most passionate conservation advocates — because she has watched, in real time, as the forests she studied have shrunk and the chimpanzees she knew have disappeared.
Today, organisations like the Jane Goodall Institute, the Chimpanzee Conservation Centre in Guinea, and Tchimpounga Sanctuary in the Republic of Congo work to protect wild populations, rehabilitate orphaned chimpanzees, and support the communities living alongside them.
The argument for saving chimpanzees is not just ecological. It is philosophical. In protecting them, we protect something that reflects our own origins — a living mirror of what we once were, and a reminder of how much we still share.
5 Facts About Chimpanzees That Will Stay With You
- They remember faces for decades — chimpanzees have been shown to recognise photographs of individuals they haven’t seen in over 25 years.
- They have distinct personalities — long-term studies have documented chimpanzee individuals with consistent personality traits — some bold, some shy, some curious, some aggressive — that remain stable across their lifetimes.
- They can beat humans at memory tasks — in a famous experiment, young chimpanzees outperformed university students at a working memory task involving numbers flashed briefly on a screen. The results shocked the scientific community.
- They mourn their dead — documented cases include mothers carrying deceased infants for weeks, and community members sitting in silence around a dying elder.
- They are running out of time — at current rates of habitat loss and hunting, some subspecies could be functionally extinct in the wild within 30 years.
Want to Go Deeper?
Our Chimpanzee: Our Closest Wild Relative guide takes you inside the science of chimpanzee cognition, social behaviour, and conservation — with the latest research, field observations, and what you can do to help. Download your copy from the Wild Wonders Daily store.
💬 Leave a comment: Chimpanzees can beat humans at memory tests, make weapons, and grieve their dead. At what point do you think we have a moral obligation to give them legal rights? This is one of the most debated questions in animal ethics — we’d love to know where you stand.