JALAY TOWN, Liberia (Jun 2011) — Thump! Thump! Thump! As the hollow sound echoes through the Liberian rainforest, Vera Leinert and her fellow researchers freeze. Silently, Leinert directs the guide to investigate. Jefferson ‘Bola’ Skinnah, a ranger with the Liberian Forestry Development Authority, stalks ahead, using the thumping to mask the sound of his movement.

In a sunlit opening in the forest, Skinnah spots a large adult chimpanzee hammering something with a big stone. The chimpanzee puts a broken nut into its mouth then continues pounding. When Skinnah tries to move closer, the chimp disappears into the trees. By the time Leinert and her crew get to the clearing, the animal is long gone.

For the past year, Leinert has been trekking through Sapo National Park, Liberia’s first and only protected reserve, to study its chimpanzee population. A student volunteer at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (EVA) in Leipzig, Germany, Leinert has never seen her elusive subjects in the flesh but she knows some of them well. There’s an energetic young male with a big belly who hammers nuts so vigorously he has to grab a sapling for support. There are the stronger adults who can split a nut with three blows. And there are the mothers who parade through the site with their babies. They’ve all been caught by video cameras placed strategically throughout Sapo.

Chimpanzees in the wild are notoriously difficult to study because they flee from humans — with good reason. Bushmeat hunting and human respiratory diseases have decimated chimpanzee populations¹, while logging and mining have wiped out their habitat. Population numbers have plunged — although no one knows by exactly how much because in most countries with great apes, the animals have never been properly surveyed.

The Pan Africa Great Ape Program, the first Africa-wide great-ape census to be mounted, could change that. In addition to surveying chimpanzee numbers (see ‘How many chimpanzees are left?’), project scientists plan to set up automated video and audio recording devices at 40 research sites in 15 countries with chimp populations. Led by Christophe Boesch, director of the primatology department at the EVA, and Hjalmar Kühl, also at the EVA, the programme aims to get a picture of how chimpanzee behaviour — from nut cracking to vocal calls — varies across Africa. Ultimately, the hope is to learn about the origins and extent of what, in humans, would be called culture.

Until recently, scientists regarded culture — defined as socially transmitted behaviours — as exclusive to humans, but there is growing recognition that many animals exhibit some sort of culture. Chimpanzees, which share 98% of their genes with humans, have the most varied set of behaviours documented in the animal world. The difference between humans and animals is growing less distinct, say some researchers. “It is not black and white,” says Kühl, who is Leinert’s supervisor at the EVA.

In the old scenario, “only humans have culture”, says Jason Kamilar, a biogeographer in the department of anthropology at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. “Then, culture would be the defining feature of humanity, which evolved some time after the split between the human and chimp lineages,” he says. But “if chimps have culture, then presumably the last common ancestor of chimps and humans had culture”.

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The first ever pan African great ape survey aims to get an accurate estimate of chimpanzee populations remaining in the wild.

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