Make Humans Great Again

One day in the 1960s, in a forest in Tanzania, a 26-year-old British ethologist watched a chimpanzee she had nicknamed “David Greybeard” digging termites out of a mound with a stick. Birds had long been known to use “tools”—Egyptian vultures drop stones onto eggs to crack them open, and Darwin had seen finches on the Galapagos Islands using cactus spines to pry insects out of wood. But Jane Goodall was astounded to see a mammal doing something similar. It strengthened in her mind something that had often been surmised—that chimpanzees were proto-humans, us as we used to be millions of years before we diverged into Australopithecus, Neanderthal, and, finally, Sapiens.