Chimpanzees use tools... for what???

(graphic by Viktor Koen, New York Times)

In a funny - but scientifically accurate - story in the New York Times (registration is required, though it's free), John Tierney finds that chimpanzees really are remarkably like human beings:

In a 50th anniversary essay in the journal Science, the primatologist William C. McGrew begins by hailing the progression of chimpanzee studies from field notes to “theory-driven, hypothesis-testing ethnology.”

He tactfully waits until the third paragraph — journalists call this “burying the lead” — to deliver the most devastating blow yet to human self-esteem. After noting that chimpanzees’ “tool kits” are now known to include 20 items, Dr. McGrew casually mentions that they’re used for “various functions in daily life, including subsistence, sociality, sex, and self-maintenance.”

Sex? Chimpanzees have tools for sex? No way. If ever there was an intrinsically human behavior, it had to be the manufacture of sex toys. ...

I couldn’t imagine how chimps managed this evolutionary leap. But then, I couldn’t imagine what they were actually doing. Using blades of grass to tickle one another? Building heart-shaped beds of moss? Using stones for massages, or vines for bondage, or — well, I really had no idea,...

It is kind of funny. But it's neat, too. The more we learn about chimpanzees, the less unique human beings seem to be (except in the sense that all species are unique, of course). In the wild, chimpanzee "tribes" actually have their own cultures, which are taught to their young and are not the same in every population.

We human beings are animals, like other animals. We are apes, like other apes. We are a unique species, like any other species, but we're still very similar to our relatives - biologically and, to some extent, behaviorally. Realizing that doesn't diminish us. On the contrary, it makes what we've accomplished even more admirable.

And our species does not have a divine mandate to destroy all other species. We are all family, and we actually have an obligation to our siblings, don't you think? Not to mention what a poorer place this would be without them.