The pearl of Africa (Uganda) is known to harbour about 4, 900 chimps of which some are in the wild and others are conserved in the wild life educational centre the former Zoo and other sanctuaries. You can see chimpanzees and other primates on a tour to Uganda – they are awe-inspiring.
The chimps have large bodies and have over 90% of its genes like those of humans, making them the closest living animal relatives of man. The Chimps give birth every 4-5 years and look after their infants for 10-12 years before they are old enough to live by themselves in the world.
Unlike Gorillas the chimps live in a population that splits up and later joins again. Chimpanzees are just like people-they use gears such as rocks to break nuts, sticks to fish for termites and make sponges from leaves to soak up water for drinking from holes in trees.
Chimpanzee Communication
Chimps employ a rich variety of gestures and facial expressions to keep in touch with each other, and more importantly, there is intelligence behind the exchanges that makes for a level of understanding unseen elsewhere in the animal world. This sort of communication ability is what makes chimps appear far more socially advanced than any other animal. They may have a simple repertoire of noises and body language, but the intelligence with which these signals are used and interpreted makes a big difference.
Chimps make use of simple gestures, waving their hand in the direction they want another chimp to look or holding out a begging hand for support then relying on the intelligence of the other animal to sum up the situation and react.
Some chimps even develop their own special signals. These observations indicate that chimps are the most intelligent communicators in the animal world, even compared to other highly social species such as lions, wolves and monkeys. This level of communication comes from chimps' deep understanding of the social world around them, which means that each chimp must be able mentally model the impact of its own actions on the group as well as being able to guess the intentions of others.
Chimps are also known to invent their own personal noises, maybe using particular grunts to mean certain things. However, such personal noises are not as obvious as gestures to human observers. In other words, it is quite possible for chimps- or early man- to make symbolic use of noises, even if these "proto words" have a fixed meaning only for the individuals uttering them. This use of personal noises would at least be the first step towards language. This therefore makes the chimp the only animals that are moving to communication since they behave like babies at the moment- they use gestures and noise which are understandable by the others like babies chimps have hope of speaking a language we cant guess now.
