The chimpanzee mother nurses her infant for four to five years. The growing chimpanzee child then spends a prolonged childhood, until age ten or eleven, living with his or her family. Wild chimpanzees make and use a variety of tools for gathering and preparing food. For example, the chimpanzees of West Africa practice a stone tool culture. Their hammers and anvils, used to crack hard nuts, are similar to the tools of our own hominid ancestors.
Chimpanzees seek out and use certain plants medicinally, to treat symptoms of various illnesses.
Scientists following chimpanzees in the rainforest have been led to a variety of formerly unknown plant species that have pharmaceutical uses ranging from antibiotics to antiviral agents. In the late 1950s, the U.S. Air Force captured more than 100 chimpanzees in the African jungle and began using them to test the effects of space flight. There are another 1,500 chimpanzee research subjects living in American biomedical laboratories. At the turn of this century there were five million chimpanzees living on the African continent. Since then, wild chimpanzee populations have been decimated as humans have destroyed African tropical forests, hunted the chimpanzee for food, and captured thousands of chimps for sale to American and European laboratories, circuses, and zoos.