![]() ![]() ![]() The non-captive cousins of the two great-ape species in the center, Western Lowland gorillas and chimpanzees, are endangered, two steps from extinction. Four of six great-ape species (including both species of orangutans in Indonesia) are critically endangered, just one step away from extinction. ![]() Gatherings of great-ape specialists border on the funereal. Up against swiftly changing conditions, chimps are managing to adapt in surprising ways. Their work tells a companion story to regular and worrisome predictions of great ape extinction. In the process, these young researchers have discovered evidence of remarkable behavior changes as chimpanzees come to live in ever-closer, and often fraught, proximity to humans. They were fixed more intently on comparisons between non-human species, great-ape or otherwise, such as chimps versus bonobos, or chimps versus dolphins. Earlier in the day, in reports about current research offered in a meeting room nearby, the next generation appeared to have left that timeworn argument about human/ape differences behind. To an outsider, it looked like a generational handoff was under way. In the scrum, the field’s best-known trailblazers jostled up against clusters of younger scholars. The apes may have had us surrounded, but we had them far outnumbered-which is, of course, the main rub in their existence. Now, they numbered in the hundreds, assembled for the largest gathering of chimp researchers since an inaugural conference of this kind back in 1986. When Goodall began her research in the 1960s, all of the world’s experts on chimpanzees might have fit around a small coffee table. ![]() “What a zoo!” Goodall exclaimed, referring not to the gorillas and chimpanzees, but the mob of hairless, gawky bipeds (outliers, in these respects, among our genetic kin) yipping past one another towards an open bar. The wan, pert, reed-thin woman, pausing wide-eyed in the Regenstein Center’s entryway was the 82-year-old conservationist herself. New research turned less on what makes chimps distinct from humans and more on the essence of chimps themselves. Ever since, great-ape scholarship has been shaped, in part, by a raucous debate over whether more subtle differences between chimps and humans were matters of degree or kind. More than a half-century ago, Goodall’s field observations upended the notion that chimpanzees don’t make or use tools in the wild. This “fishing” behavior is an example of tool-making and tool use documented by Jane Goodall in the forests of East Africa. The mature females glanced over, adjusted their wands, and continued trolling for treats. As they streamed past, the chimps paid little attention. They were in Chicago for an international conference called Chimpanzees in Context. On this gray evening in August, hundreds of great-ape scholars squeezed between the glassed-in enclosures of the Lincoln Park Zoo’s Regenstein Center for African Apes. On our right, female chimpanzees poked sticks into a faux termite mound. Straight ahead, a silverback gorilla turned his resplendent back, hair bristling, to avoid our gaze. At twilight, the great apes had us surrounded. ![]()
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