Chimpanzees are forcing us to redefine what it means to be human
Studies of chimpanzees that show the animals living with human traits is challenging the idea that humans are the only “tool-making animal” alive
Primatologist Frans de Waal says chimpanzees can do almost everything that was once considered a distinctively human trait.
The idea that only humans make tools is today “an unsustainable position,” de Waal writes by email. “Then we also got the apes-have-no-theory-of-mind claims, which now have been seriously weakened, the culture claims, the idea that only humans are great at cooperation, and so on, none of which really holds up.”
The only unique trait of humans, he says, might be that we have symbolic language.
De Waal’s latest book—”Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?”—describes a monumental shift in our understanding of animal intelligence in recent decades. In one fascinating part, he takes on that old idea about tools by pointing to new observations of chimps, a species that shares 99% of the same DNA as humans.
Anthropologist Kenneth Oakley laid out the classical viewpoint in his 1957 book, “Man the Toolmaker,” which argued that mankind was the only animal that systematically made tools.
That stance was challenged by anthropologist Jane Goodall’s observations of chimps in the wild. When, in 1960, she described chimps stripping leaves from a stem to make a tool to dig for termites, her colleague Louis Leakey telegrammed: “Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.”