Fongoli Chimps

The Fongoli Chimps are a group of wild chimpanzees living in the Fongoli woodland in Senegal, West Africa. They are notable for in many ways behaving more like cavemen than like other chimpanzees. They have been extensively studied by Jill Pruetz for many years.

Technology
The Fongoli Chimps not only break sticks and use as spears to hunt bushbabies (which is remarkable enough in itself), they also sharpen the breach using their teeth. They also use the blunt side of their sticks to dig up tubers to eat from the ground.

Fongoli Chimp termite fishing technology is also unusually advanced. They use different sticks for different parts of the job, a thick stick for stirring the termites into attack and a thinner stick for fishing them up. They prepare their sticks in multiple steps. Their tool-kit for a single termite fishing session can be manufactured (or rather chimpufactured) in as many as five steps. Although they make their tools from wood and not stone, the number of production steps is within the range that anthropologists would consider to be behaviorally modern if it was conserved on a site with humans (Upper Paleolithic tools were generally made in four steps at most, and some anthropologists consider the Leavolloisian knives made in three steps beginning 200,000 years ago in Africa as evidence for modern human language). And yet the Fongoli Chimps do it without a full language! This means that stone age so-called "behavioral modernity" is easily explained by ape see, ape do.

Other cultural quirks
Among the Fongoli Chimps, hunting is a mostly female activity. The males that do hunt are usually (but not quite always) juvenile. This is in contrast to other chimpanzee groups, where hunting is an adult male monopoly or near-monopoly. Exactly why the Fongoli Chimps are different in this regard is unknown, but it is interesting that the only known group of wild chimpanzees to live in anything other than rainforest, as well as the only known such group to use weapons to hunt, are different in this regard. It is not so extreme in a caveman context however: Neanderthals show no gender difference in hunting-related injuries.

The Fongoli Chimps take shelter in cooler caves when it gets too hot outside.

Unlike other chimpanzees, Fongoli Chimps do not fear water. In fact, they take baths voluntarily. This may also be a way to cool down.

The Fongoli Chimps do not fear fire either. They do not panic when they see, hear and smell fire. Instead, they show understanding of how fire moves, and calmly walks where it will bypass them. The Fongoli Chimps have not tamed fire, but in hot Fongoli, why should they make it even hotter? After all, the oldest evidence for cavemen controlling fire (one million years ago) is from South Africa where the climate is cooler than in Fongoli.