Toshisada Nishida - Chimpanzees of the Lakeshore Natural History and Culture at Mahale

TOSHISADA NISHIDA

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Cambridge University Press

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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107015784

ISBN 978-1-107-01578-4 Hardback

ISBN 978-1-107-60178-9 Paperback

The book you hold in your hands, with its fine photographs and exquisite descriptions of chimpanzee behaviour by one of the worlds 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.

Interest in apes started relatively late. Early primatologists had seen them travel through the trees, eating fruits at their leisure, but rarely did they notice anything of interest in their behaviour. This was partly due to low visibility in the forest and the apes wariness of people. They disappeared as soon as they heard or saw observers approach.

The study of chimpanzee behaviour began in earnest only in the early 1960s, near the shore of Lake Tanganyika, in Tanzania. Two camps were set up, one by Western scientists at Gombe Stream and one 170 km to the south, at the foot of the Mahale Mountains, by Japanese scientists. The author of this book, Professor Toshisada Nishida of Kyoto University, started the latter camp in 1965. He was still a graduate student at the time but has worked in Mahale ever since, up to and including his retirement.

One of Dr Nishidas very first discoveries was truly ground-breaking. While science still described chimpanzees as sort of peaceful vegetarians that roamed the forest without any need for social bonds not unlike Rousseaus noble savages, who did not need each other to survive Dr Nishida noticed that chimpanzees live a communal life with clear territorial boundaries and perhaps even hostility between neighbouring unit-groups. This was not an easy discovery, because chimpanzees are often encountered alone or in small groups in the forest, so one can determine community relations only if one knows all individuals and keeps careful track of their travels. Dr Nishidas discovery not only upset Western notions of chimpanzees as individualists, but also the ideas of Dr Nishidas own teachers, who expected chimpanzees to live, like humans, in nuclear family-like arrangements. Debate about what to expect must have been rather heated, because when Dr Nishidas teacher, Professor Junichiro Itani, arrived in Kigoma, the student couldnt wait for their actual reunion, and shouted from aboard the steamship Liemba : There is no familoid in the chimpanzee society. Professor Itani shouted back: That cant be true!

We have learned much about chimpanzees since then, such as that they hunt and eat meat; that they raid their neighbours territory and occasionally kill each other; that they use a complex set of tools, which differs from group to group; that they medicate themselves with plants; that males engage in power politics while competing over status and females; and so on. The list of discoveries is impressive, and the Mahale field site has been absolutely central in furnishing the evidence. From the start, the approach followed at Mahale has been that of the grand teacher of both Dr Nishida and Professor Itani, Professor Kinji Imanishi, who urged his students to identify individuals and to follow them over time. Not just for weeks or months, as previous studies had done, but for years and years, so that one began to understand the kinship relations within the group.

With a species that breeds as slowly and is as long-lived as the chimpanzee, one needs to follow individuals for a long time to know whether or not two adult males are brothers, or how many offspring a female raises during her lifetime. Before scientists learned to analyse DNA evidence, the only way to know much about genetic relatedness was a long-term project like the one Dr Nishida set up.