Chimpanzees Essay

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Introduction: General description and geographic distribution
There are many individuals around the world who are unaware of the intellectual capacity of chimpanzees and other primates. According to National Geographic, chimpanzees are one of our closest living relatives; we share ninety-eight percent of our DNA with them (“Chimpanzees”). Chimpanzees can be naturally found in Southern Senegal, the Congo River, Western Uganda, and Western Tanzia; Gombe National Park in Tanzia is the first park in Africa that was specifically developed for chimpanzees (“Chimpanzee”). Although it can be shocking for some, chimpanzees are dexterous individuals and are capable of manufacturing tools and putting them to use. Tool-usage for chimpanzees ranges from foraging to hygiene purposes, but uses of tools vary among each population (Watts). Chimpanzees use twigs, stones, branches, leaves, rocks, and much more to create the tools they need to assist them with certain tasks such as retrieving termites from their mounds with stripped twigs (Atkinson). Jane Goodall was the first person to document such tool use in the wild.
Development of Tool Use
A team of researchers did a study on chimpanzees where they showed that the technologies they introduced would spread into the different ape communities. In the study they “trained a high-ranking female from each of two groups of captive chimpanzees to adopt one of two different too-use techniques for obtaining food from the same ‘pan-pipe’ apparatus, then re-introduced each female to her respective group” (Whiten, Horner, and Waal). There were two tool-use techniques: lift or poke; each high-ranking female had to use one or the other exclusively. The rest of the high-ranking female’s group watched her for t...

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...e. These reasons contribute to why wild chimpanzees have a higher frequency of tool usage than captive chimpanzees.
Conclusion
Drawing from extensive findings in both the wild and captive chimpanzee, one can see that tool use and tool manufacturing are important and practiced in both cases. Wild chimpanzees use more complex techniques than captive chimpanzees, which is evident in nut-cracking at the Tai National Park. The wild chimpanzees use the discretion of weight of branches or hammers and the hardness of the nuts to make the decision of which tools to use for each nut. In contrast, captive chimpanzees do not use these same complex techniques; they learn a lot from observation of their mothers or others. All in all, chimpanzees have great intelligence and it is shown in their ability of tool use and tool manufacturing, regardless of being wild or captive.

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