Photo insight

Frans Lanting recounts how he took this image of a group of chimpanzees in Senegal and gained an astonishing insight into their behavior

MUCH of what we know about wild chimpanzees comes from studies of forest communities in equatorial Africa, but a group of savanna chimps living in north-west Africa is making us rethink the nature of our closest cousins. The chimps from Fongoli in south-east Senegal live in a zone where the forest gives way to an open savanna environment much like the landscape where early humans evolved. The savanna chimps do things differently from their forest cousins, largely because the environment is very different. They made headlines around the world when biological anthropologist Jill Pruetz observed them making primitive spears to hunt bushbabies, which upended our idea that only humans use weapons. Her work reveals a variety of cultural behaviours between chimps in different regions in much the same way as diversity between humans. I worked with her directly as I was working on a series about chimps.

This was a gruelling project. We followed the chimps for two months and covered 700km on foot carrying heavy packs. It was very hot and humid. This particular image was taken at a waterhole at the beginning of the rainy season. It was beastly hot and the Fongoli chimps like to cool off in the waterhole, defying the common notion that chimps don’t like water. I was keen to document this unique behavior, but the chimps were shy even after two months of tracking them daily. However, their regular visits to one secluded waterhole gave me the idea for an image that would put my camera in much closer proximity to them than I could ever be.
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