Once thought to be strictly vegetarian, the Chimps were discovered to form organized hunting parties that would carefully stalk and kill Colobus Monkeys as food, sharing the highly-prized meat among the members of the hunting party. The chimps were able to make and use tools (an area formerly thought to be exclusively human), including stone hammers for nut-cracking, stripped twigs for "termite fishing", and sharpened wooden spears for hunting bushbabies-and these formed local "cultures", with each troop passing its own knowledge base from generation to generation. They had a thorough knowledge of their natural surroundings and were able to utilize them intelligently-they were even able to select plants with medicinal properties when they needed them. The Chimps, our closest genetic relatives, were uncannily like humans: they formed tightly-knit social groups and complex political structures that were based on alliances and partnerships. Over the next five decades, Jane Goodall uncovered much about Chimpanzees that had not been known before. It became one of the most remarkable longterm scientific studies ever undertaken. So he assigned three students to the task: one was sent to Borneo to study Orang-utans, another was sent to Rwanda to study Gorillas, and a third, Jane Goodall, was sent to Gombe Forest in Tanzania to study Chimpanzees. That changed when Dr Louis Leakey, a prominent paleontologist in Africa, decided that one way to learn more about the possible social structures of early humans ancestors was to study our closest living relatives. Until the 1960's, there had been little effort to study the great apes in the wild. Chimp using a twig to poke food from a tree trunk
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