6 Nov /13

Chimpanzee

Chimpanzees were sighted by the Portuguese in Africa as early as the beginning of the 1500s, and one was presented to Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange, in 1640. But it was only in 1738 that the first chimpanzee arrived in London. “She is the female of the creature which the Angolans call chimpanzee”.  The name derives from the Bantu word kivili-chimpenze for ape. On its first appearance in Britain this exotic creature was treated as a rarity and did not linger in the public consciousness.

It was Darwin with his evolutionary theories and concept of the missing link who catapulted chimpanzees into the limelight. It may have helped that the word was abbreviated to “chimp” for easier reference in 1877.

The chimp is the closest relative of the human, sharing about 98% of our genes. They have larger, more highly developed brains than other species of monkey, live in communities and typically form family relationships that result in young chimps spending the first ten years of their lives living with their mothers. The intelligence of our hairy cousins has often been debated, and scientists at Germany’s Max Planck Institute have recently studied the ability of chimpanzees to reason, bargain and behave manipulatively in social situations. At the Kyoto Institute in Japan a chimp named Ayumu has successfully completed numerical memory tests that many human subjects had previously struggled with.

Sadly this intelligence and responsiveness has made them ideal victims for medical or psychological research and threatened their existence in the wild. Today they are an endangered species with only around 200,000 animals living free.

Did you like the article? Then please like and share it on Facebook, tweet it on Twitter or add it in Google+.