Within the Gombe Stream National Park live other chimpanzee communities other than the Kasakela, which also inhabit certain home ranges.

This presents an invaluable opportunity for close observation of a chimpanzee community, one heretofore undisturbed by humans.

In some chimpanzee communities, the young females may inherit high status from a high-ranking mother.

He ignores or minimizes recent advances in this field, such as the discovery of extensive stone tool technology in some wild chimpanzee communities and the profound similarities found between human and bonobo sexuality.

And if there were such an isolated continuous chimpanzee community, how would they begin to view the origin of language?

"I had whole chimpanzee communities charging to about five meters and screaming at me, and that's very unusual behavior."

He interprets this as evidence of "a very stressed chimpanzee community, which is exactly what we would expect if this sort of chimpanzee war was going on."

In the new report, Dr. Whiten and his colleagues make their case for ape culture by citing 39 behaviors that vary in prevalence and style among the seven chimpanzee communities.

The researchers first compiled a list of 65 candidate behaviors that they suspected might be specific to different chimpanzee communities.

Observations in the wild indicate that the males among the related common chimpanzee communities are extraordinarily hostile to males from outside the community.