During the final months of 1960, in what is now Gombe national park, Tanzania, Jane Goodall, then 26 years old, made two discoveries that established her name and reputation as a field scientist studying wild apes. First, she observed chimpanzees eating red meat. Before that moment, the scientific consensus, based on virtually no direct observation, was that chimpanzees were vegetarians.
Then she witnessed an even more unexpected behaviour: a chimpanzee male, crouched next to a high earthen tower built by termites, studiously modifying a long stalk of grass until it became a useful probe. The chimp then inserted the probe into a narrow tunnel that descended deep into the mound. As Goodall soon came to understand, members of the insect species’ soldier caste inside the mound instinctively lock their powerful mandibles on to any intruding object – and thus they became, once the probe was carefully drawn back out, victims of a crafty ape. The termites, potentially a significant source of nutrition, were tasty enough to serve as food for several species of monkey in that part of east Africa. Only chimpanzees, however, had developed the cultural tradition of “fishing” for them.
