Word: chimp
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...experiment supervised by Nicholas Toth of Indiana University, Kanzi watched as a favorite treat was placed inside a box. The box was then locked, and the key was placed inside another box tied up by a cord. It added up to a Houdini-like challenge for the chimp: how to get to the treat...
...inside his cage, Kanzi had the makings of a tool that could solve the riddle: some pieces of flint he had selected during an excursion to the countryside. No sweat! By slamming the flints against the concrete floor, the chimp created knifelike chips, which he used to cut the cord and free the key. He then used the key to open the other box and grab the treat...
...granite with two small hollows on the top. The rock has marks from heavy use for some purpose. "If an anthropologist came upon this in the forest," says Boesch, "he might think he had found a human artifact." Instead, it is used by chimpanzees for nut cracking. The chimps place a panda nut in one of the depressions and then smash it with a smaller stone. Boesch has watched a mother chimp instruct her young in the art of nut cracking...
...answer may be politics, which is hardly confined to human society. Scottish psychologists Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten believe chimps are positively "Machiavellian" in their efforts to acquire power within a group. In the Mahale Mountains in Tanzania, for instance, Japanese primatologist Toshisada Nishida observed one male chimp shift his support between two more dominant males who needed his allegiance to maintain power. The bigger males curried favor with this artful manipulator by allowing him access to fertile females. When a ruler began to take him for granted, the canny old chimp would shift allegiance to the pretender, thus ensuring...
...complex game of social chess played by chimps and other primates, having the intellectual skills to anticipate a rival's moves and engage in deceit is a distinct advantage. Consider the double deception observed at a feeding station in Tanzania's Gombe Stream Reserve. A wild chimp had the luck to be alone next to a feeding box when it was opened by remote control. Noticing that another, more dominant chimp was approaching, the first one closed the box and moved nonchalantly away until the second chimp moved on. Once the interloper was gone, the first chimp opened...