Foreword

The book you hold in your hands, with its fine photographs and exquisite descriptions of chimpanzee behaviour by one of the world’s greatest experts, would have been unthinkable half a century ago. We have come such a long way in our knowledge of chimpanzees, and the discoveries have reached us in such a gradual and cumulative fashion, that we hardly realise how little we used to know about our nearest relatives.

At the time, chimpanzees did not yet occupy the special place in our thinking about human evolution that they do today. Strangely enough, science looked at baboons as the best model of our ancestors, as baboons, too, had descended from the trees to become savanna-dwellers. These rambunctious monkeys, however, are quite far removed from us. For one thing, they have tails. Apes and humans belong to a small superfamily within the primate order, known as the hominoids, which are marked by flat chests, relatively long arms, large body size, superior intelligence, and the absence of a tail. Apart from humans and chimpanzees, living members of the superfamily include only gorillas, bonobos, orangutans, and gibbons.