Why Do Chimpanzees Use Correct Spelling And Hyphenation?

Review Exercise for Section 33 Use correct spelling and hyphenation. Correct any misspellings and hyphenation errors.

Recently, researchers who study chimpanzees have come to the surprising conclusion that groups of chimpanzees have their own traditions that can be passed on to new generations of chimps. The chimps do not acquire these traditions by instinct; instead, they learn them from other chimps. When a scientific journal published analyses of chimpanzee behavior, the author revealed that the everyday actions of chimpanzees in separate areas differ in significant ways, even when the groups belong to the same subspecies. For instance, in one West African group, the chimps are often seen putting a nut on a stone and using another piece of stone to crack the nut open—a kind of behavior never observed in other groups of chimpanzees. Scientists have also observed the chimps teaching their young the nut opening method, and chimps in other places that crack nuts differently teach their young their own way. Therefore, researchers have concluded that chimpanzees have local traditions.

The word culture has traditionally been used to describe human behavior, but maybe, he says, a new definition is needed. Considering this startlingly new theory of chimpanzee “culture,” some researchers think that humans now have an undeniable obligation to protect the lives of all remaining wild chimpanzees rather than zeroing in on just a few of the threatened animals. The loss of a single group of wild chimpanzees would, they say, destroy something irreplaceable—a unique culture with its own traditions and way of