Just because there’s no patent office in the jungle doesn’t
mean that its inhabitants are uninventive. Japanese researchers working in a
forested region of Guinea, West Africa, have issued a rare description of a
chimpanzee creating a new form of tool use and later instituting improvements
to the technique.
In March 2003, a team led by primatologist Shinya Yamamoto
of KyotoUniversity saw a 5-year-old male chimp
known as JJ sitting in a tree, fishing carpenter ants out of a hollow in the
trunk with a long stick.
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