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[Andrew Hund <axh69 AT po.cwru.edu>]

Source:Washington University In St. Louis
Date:2003-03-14
Chimpanzees With Little Or No Human Contact Found In Remote African Rainforest

It's been called "The Last Place on Earth" by National Geographic magazine, 
and Time describes it as the "Last Eden."

The Goualougo Triangle, nestled between two rivers in a Central African 
rain forest, is so remote that primate researchers who traveled 34 miles, 
mostly by foot, from the nearest village through dense forests and 
swampland to get there, have discovered a rare find: chimpanzees that have 
had very little or no contact at all with humans. The chimpanzees' behavior 
when first coming in contact with the researchers was a telltale sign of 
lack of human exposure -- the chimpanzees didn't run and hide.

Unlike chimpanzees in the zoo that seem to appreciate being the center of 
human attention, chimpanzees in the wild need to be habituated to the 
presence of humans, a process that can take several years. Dave Morgan, a 
field researcher with the Wildlife Conservation Society, Republic of Congo, 
and Crickette Sanz, a doctoral candidate in anthropology in Arts & Sciences 
at Washington University in St. Louis, report their study of "Naive 
Encounters With Chimpanzees in the Goualougo Triangle" in the April 2003 
issue of the International Journal of Primatology.

During two field seasons in the Goualougo Triangle (February-December 1999 
and June 2000-June 2001), Morgan and Sanz encountered chimpanzees on 218 
different occasions, totaling 365 hours of direct observation. Their goal, 
as with other researchers at various field sites in Africa, was to directly 
observe the full repertoire of chimpanzee behavior, which includes eating 
meat, sharing food, grooming, mating and using tools, such as large 
pounding sticks to break open bee hives and leaf sponges to gather water.

During Morgan and Sanz's first five minutes observing individual 
chimpanzees at their field site, curiosity was the most common response the 
researchers recorded from 84 percent of the chimpanzees. The curious 
responses from the chimpanzees included staring at the human observers, 
crouching and moving closer to get a better view of them, slapping tree 
trunks or throwing branches down to elicit a response, and making 
inquisitive vocalizations.

"Such an overwhelmingly curious response to the arrival of researchers had 
never been reported from another chimpanzee study site," says Sanz. 
"Researchers have occasionally described encounters with apes who showed 
curious behaviors toward them. However, these encounters were rare and 
usually consisted of only a few individuals."

She says that chimpanzees at these other study sites most often fled from 
human observers during their initial contacts. Those researchers only had 
glimpses of individual chimpanzees as they rapidly departed.

Researchers have dedicated years at other field sites to habituating wild 
chimpanzees to human presence so that the chimpanzees regard the humans in 
their midst as neutral elements not to be feared. Morgan and Sanz often 
times were accepted at first meeting.
"Behaviors such as tool use and relaxed social interactions were only seen 
after years of patient habituation efforts," Morgan says of the other field 
studies, including Jane Goodall's site in the Gombe Stream National Park in 
East Africa. "Yet these behaviors were sometimes observed during our 
initial contacts with chimpanzees in the Goualougo Triangle.

"And many of our initial contacts lasted for more than two hours -- some up 
to seven hours -- and ended only when we chose to leave the chimpanzees to 
continue our surveys. Often times when we were leaving the chimpanzees, 
they would follow us through the forest canopy."

Often the chimpanzees continued to exhibit behaviors indicating their 
naivete toward humans after their initial curious responses. Morgan and 
Sanz define "naive" contacts as those in which the chimpanzees in a group 
showed interest in their observers throughout an entire encounter, other 
chimpanzees joined the group being observed, and they stayed for a 
relatively prolonged time, with the average encounter lasting 136 minutes. 
These "naive" contacts accounted for 69 percent of all chimpanzee encounters.

Other types of encounters occurred, Sanz notes, but much less frequently. 
Of the 218 encounters, during 12 percent of them the chimpanzees showed 
signs of nervousness, including hiding behind vegetation or climbing higher 
in the canopy; 11 percent departed; and eight percent ignored the observers.

"The high frequency of curious responses to our arrival and the naive 
contacts suggest that the chimpanzees had had little or no contact with 
humans," says Sanz. "They certainly had not formed negative associations 
between human presence and potential threats such as poaching, hunting and 
habitat destruction.

"During our research presence in the Goualougo Triangle, we've never 
encountered any other humans or even their traces, such as villages, 
campsites or paths," adds Sanz. "Because of the low human density in 
northern Congo and the remote location of the Goualougo Triangle, it is 
unlikely that these chimpanzees had ever encountered humans."

The study site's history substantiates this conclusion, says Morgan. People 
residing in Bomassa village, the closest village at 34 miles away, claim 
that they had not visited the Goualougo Triangle until initial surveys were 
conducted in 1993 by Michael Fay, a conservationist with the New-York based 
Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). At the time, Fay, who received his 
doctorate in anthropology from Washington University in 1997, was part of a 
WCS team documenting the importance of the Goualougo Triangle to 
conservation and science. The 100-square-mile Goualougo Triangle is on the 
southern end of the Nouabale-Ndoki National Park. When the park was created 
in 1993, the Goualougo Triangle was left out because it was a part of a 
logging concession.

After discovering this naive chimpanzee population and their trust in 
humans -- as well as having had naivecontacts with other primate species 
like gorillas and monkeys that would be vulnerable to poachers and logging 
-- Morgan and Sanz felt an obligation to ensure their long-term protection. 
Nave encounters with the chimpanzees put the Goualougo Triangle at the top 
of the WCS' list of priority conservation projects, says Morgan. The 
chimpanzees' unique behavior helped persuade Congolese government officials 
and the local logging company, which had legal rights to the forest rich in 
mahogany and other valuable hardwoods, to preserve the pristine habitat.
In July 2001, representatives of the WCS, Congolese government and the 
logging company announced during a news conference that the Goualougo 
Triangle was to be annexed to the park and its intact ecosystem and 
undisturbed animal populations would be protected forever.

Goodall visits site "Dave and Crickette's work on this chimpanzee 
population is simply amazing," says renowned primatologist Robert W. 
Sussman, Ph.D., a professor of anthropology at Washington University and 
Sanz and Fay's doctoral advisor. "There is no doubt in my mind that this 
research will lead to a much better understanding of chimpanzee ecology and 
behavior, and will set the stage for data collection for years to come. I 
also believe that this research also may lead to better models of the 
evolution of human evolution because these chimpanzees are so free from 
human interference."

Goodall, considered the world's foremost authority on chimpanzees, also 
found Morgan and Sanz's discovery of a naïve chimpanzee population of such 
great interest that she visited the site last summer. In nearly 45 years of 
observing chimpanzees' behavior in their environment and working to gain 
their trust, Goodall's visit to Goualougo Triangle was the first at another 
study site other than her own in the forests of the Gombe National Park. 
Goodall was curious to see the naive chimpanzees that she had heard showed 
no fear of humans as well as interested in observing how these chimpanzees 
differed from those living at Gombe. Within the last few years, Goodall and 
other researchers have been comparing chimpanzee behaviors such as tool use 
and social traditions that are passed on from one individual to another 
through social learning.

The study of these "chimpanzee cultures" was limited to sites in East and 
West Africa, Sanz notes, because of political instability and logistical 
difficulties of setting up long-term field sites in Central Africa.

"Prior to the Goualougo Chimpanzee Project," Morgan says, "there were no 
sites where researchers could conduct direct observations of the behavior 
and ecology of the central subspecies of chimpanzee residing in the largest 
tracts of undisturbed forest remaining in equatorial Africa."

As a result of her visit to the Goualougo Triangle -- which National 
Geographicmagazine covered and will feature in its April 2003 issue -- 
Goodall has extended her conservation efforts into Central Africa. The Jane 
Goodall Institute recently launched a fund-raising "Campaign to Save the 
Rainforest of the Congo Basin." After her visit to the Goualougo Triangle, 
Goodall wrote to the National Geographic Society: "This study is of the 
utmost importance -- it is the first such work to be undertaken in a 
rainforest that has not been exploited by humans, where the chimpanzees, 
initially, had never seen human beings. Such places are becoming 
increasingly rare, and the information that has already come out of the 
research is both fascinating and important."

"It was such an honor to have Jane Goodall in our camp," Sanz says. "Our 
field site is going on four years and her site has been active for that 
many decades! But as we enter our fourth year in the Goualougo Triangle, we 
have accomplished a lot within a relatively short research presence, 
including collecting detailed behavioral data, and beginning to describe 
the social structure of several communities within the study area.

"Although we will continue to census individual chimpanzees throughout the 
area," Sanz continues, "we hope to habituate only a few communities in the 
core of the study area. The other communities will be left to live their 
lives free from human contact."

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued for 
journalists and other members of the public. If you wish to quote any part 
of this story, please credit Washington University In St. Louis as the 
original source. You may also wish to include the following link in any 
citation:


> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/03/030314071708.htm