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extreme expression of disgust—one reserved, interestingly, for humans. I knew that a captive ape might care for a kitten if you gave one to it, but had not heard of a wild chimpanzee taking one in, as Tia did with a genet kitten. The list goes on. Chimps get up to get snacks in the middle of the night. They lie on their backs and do “the airplane” with their children.They kiss. Shake hands. Pick their scabs before they’re ready.
    The taboo on anthropomorphizing seems odd, given that the closeness—evolutionary, genetic, and behavioral—between chimpanzees and humans is the very reason we study chimps so obsessively. Some thousand-plus studies have been published on chimpanzees. As a colleague of Pruetz’s once said to her, “A chimp takes a crap in the forest, and someone publishes a paper about it.” (No exaggeration. One paper has a section on chimpanzees’ use of “leaf napkins”: “This hygienic technology is directed to their bodily fluids (blood, semen, feces, urine, snot) … Their use ranges from delicate dabbing to vigorous wiping.”
    As for the chimps, they are not nearly as intrigued by the ape-human connection. While we’ve been observing them, they have largely ignored us, occasionally shooting a glance over one shoulder as they move through the brush. There is no fear in this glance, but neither is there curiosity or any sort of social overture. It is a glance that says simply,
Them again
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    Even Mike. He just turned away from my gaze and pointedly, or so it seemed, rolled over to turn his back on me. In hindsight, I would have to say that the reason Mike had been looking at me was that I happened to be in his line of vision.
    The chimps begin making their nests, breaking off leafy branches and dragging them into the treetops. Pruetz will wait until all are bedded down before turning to head back. We sit and listen to their “nest grunts”—soft, breathy calls that seem to express nothing more than the deep contentment one feels at the end of a day, in a comfortable bed.

Primatologist Jill Pruetz holding a “spear” fashioned and used by a Fongoli chimpanzee. To make the weapon, the chimps sharpen a stick with their teeth and use it to hunt nocturnal bush babies, small primates that sleep by day in tree hollows
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    (Frans Lanting/National Geographic Stock)

    Kanzi, a bonobo at the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa, proudly holds a photographic display of one successful linguistic task. When asked to make a toy dog bite a toy snake, Kanzi correctly placed the dog’s mouth on the snake. When asked to make the snake bite the dog, he correctly reversed their positions
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    (Michael Nichols/National Geographic Stock)

    Previously, humans had been thought to be the only species capable of making and using tools. In 1960, Jane Goodall first observed chimpanzees “termite fishing,” using straws, sticks, and vines to extract termites from termite mounds. As her project supporter Dr. Louis Leakey noted in a telegram, the discovery urged the scientific world to “… redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.”
    (Frans Lanting/National Geographic Stock)

    No ant is in charge in an ant colony. Not the queen, not the soldiers, not the workers. Instead, the colony functions as thousands of individuals informing one another of their surrounding conditions, a principle that humans have begun applying as potential solutions to complex business models
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    (jokerpro/Shutterstock)

    A queen bee surrounded by drones and workers. Despite her role as the only bee to always remain in the hive, it is not the queen who decides where their next home will be, but the colony as a whole. Scouting parties try to convince the majority of their fellow scouts by dancing to indicate the most suitable location
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    (JSseng/Shutterstock)

    Five swarm-bots communicate with one another during a test run
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Equipped with sonar, cameras, and wireless Internet, the highly maneuverable robots were developed