Chimpanzees are our closest living relatives. In fact, chimps are more closely related to you and I than they are to other apes, like gorillas. That means we can learn a lot about ourselves by studying chimpanzees. But to really learn the secrets of these amazing animals, you can’t just watch them in a zoo. You have to venture out to where they live.

Jane Goodall’s work with wild chimpanzees in Tanzania in the 1960s was groundbreaking in many ways. No one had ever gotten wild chimpanzees to trust them enough to allow close observation of what they do. And, although people had studied captive chimpanzees for decades, she saw chimps doing things that had never been seen before. Her work revealed that wild chimpanzees have much more complex and sophisticated behaviors than people previously thought. That was true of both their individual behaviors– like fishing for termites with a stick– but also their social interactions.

But Jane Goodall’s work also proved that it was possible for wild chimpanzees to become habituated to the presence of humans. And that paved the way for other researchers to do the same...

Researchers like Dr. Jill Pruetz, who has been studying wild chimpanzees in the West African nation of Senegal since 2001 when she began the processing of habituating chimpanzees at a savanna site called Fongoli. While several other groups of forest chimps had been habituated since Jane Goodall’s work in the 1960s, no one had successfully habituated savanna chimps. Until Jill Pruetz did-- and her work has revealed that savanna chimps are quite different from forest chimps.

Jill Pruetz is Regents Professor of Anthropology at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. In addition to publishing dozens of research papers about chimps and other primates, she is also the author of several books, including her latest, Apes on the Edge: Chimpanzee Life on the West African Savanna published by The University of Chicago Press.

Learn more about Jill Pruetz’s work with savanna chimpanzees and how you can help:

Jill Pruetz's Faculty Profile at Texas State University: https://faculty.txst.edu/profile/2013121

Jill Pruetz book, Apes on the Edge: Chimpanzee Life on the West African Savanna: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo238989411.html

Neighbor Ape, a non-profit organization dedicated to the conservation of chimpanzees in Senegal and to the well-being of humans that live alongside them: https://www.globalgiving.org/donate/10235/neighbor-ape/

This podcast is produced by 3Wire Creative.

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