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 and could not see clearly what he was doing. He seemed to be poking pieces of grass into the mound, 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 actually picking leafy twigs then stripping the leaves so that the twig was a suitable tool. This was modification of an object to make a tool — the crude beginning of tool making. Until that time scientists thought that humans, and only humans, used and made tools. Our species was defined as "Man the Tool Maker." That ability was thought to separate us from other animals more than any other characteristic. 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 — flailing branches and throwing rocks as missiles. In communities outside Gombe, chimpanzees use objects for different purposes. These behaviors, passed from one generation to the next through observational learning, can be regarded as primitive cultures.