 The research question we had is to understand chimpanzee culture, because the concept of culture has been created for humans. And we humans, we all prize ourselves for having such wonderful, diverse, extended cultures. And this has stayed, you know, a kind of accepted facts by many scientists until we have started to look at animals in the wild and discovered that they also have cultures. But now, if you look at what we know, the problem is on one side we have the human cultures, where we have hundreds of different societies, where we can compare them for language differences, culture in the way they find war, they eat, they dress, all these things. On the other side, with the chimpanzees, we have 10 to 12 at most different societies you can compare. So is this huge difference affecting our understanding of animal culture on one side and therefore affecting the comparison? The other issue is that if you have a sample, only 12, how much of the cultural diversity in chimpanzees are we missing? How far do we underestimate this ability, this flexibility in human, in chimpanzee culture? And how deep are chimpanzee cultures? One aspect we praise ourselves of human culture being unique is to have these cumulative abilities. If you look around yourself, we have so many artifacts that we have produced. We learned it from our ancestors, from our fathers, and we accumulated invention on it to make all these complex artifacts. You have like computers, cameras, and things like that. Are chimpanzees unable to do that? How can we respond to a question when we have only 12 populations? How far are we from really understanding that all these questions were kind of driving us in trying to find a way to answer it? The problem we're studying chimpanzees is that chimpanzees in the wild have always been subject to hunting by humans. So they're extremely afraid of humans. And when they see a human, they just run away. And when we started our study, long-term studies on chimpanzees in these different 12 populations I mentioned, we had a long year, a long process of habituating the chimpanzees to human presence. And it takes five years. So it was impossible for us to adapt the classic method of studying wild chimpanzees for this project. So what was the solution? The method we used for this new project was to use the big advantage we can gain with camera traps. The problem was then, where do you place a camera trap in an isolated place in Africa to observe new, unknown behavior of chimpanzees? And so we had first to select areas where we suspected there could be chimpanzees that would be in an environment that would be interesting. So the environment part was easy because we know quite well how the habitat vegetation is distributed in Africa. But to be sure that there would be chimpanzees and that there would be something interesting was much more difficult. And therefore we had a plan to have, for all these 40 different sites we decided to find, to have 12 months of data so that we would have exactly the same protocol made everywhere with the same kind of information. And for these 12 months, the camera would be placed in the site to understand the biodiversity of the sites and to place them at locations where we suspected the chimpanzees to do interesting things. For that, our teams had first to explore this area on average 25 square kilometers to find remains of chimpanzee behavior that would be interesting. And they would inform us and we would kind of agree like that where you have to place the cameras. And one obvious place to put cameras is at fixed places where we know chimpanzees are doing interesting behavior. And one easy candidate was to put the cameras at termite mounds because we know that chimpanzees fish for termites different periods of the years from some of the long-term studies that have already been performed. But how do you discover a new behavior if you just place them at termite mound? And so we were also exploring and looking with everything we could discover that is new. And so one of the things that came out was that we needed to be extremely open to everything and so we were looking for traces of tools discarded on the ground. The key finding we had is we had a lot of nice surprises. But it's a project that is ongoing and so we are expecting for many more surprises. But I want to highlight now two of the first findings that we have published this year. So the first one is male chimpanzees are known to display to say their location, to impress group members, chase around females. And when they do so, typically they have this display behavior where they start with pantouts who, who, who, who, who, who, who, and then they drum on the buttress tree. So this sequence, pantout and drumming is very typical for chimpanzees everywhere. But you have to have trees with big buttress. Otherwise you can't make the noise you would want to produce. And so in some areas in West Africa, in Guinea, in Guinea-Bissau, in Liberia and every coast, we discovered that the chimpanzees in drier habitat where the trees are smaller and often because they are so dry they have big injuries, cuts in the middle of the trunk, the chimpanzees would take big stones and after making this who, who, they would throw the stones at the tree trunk. And this throwing produced the noise that they probably cannot produce because buttress tree absent in their environment. And what is fascinating is that we observed that the trees which have these big injuries, some of the stones the chimpanzees are throwing inside the trunk where they accumulate. And over the years of chimpanzees coming back, you have this pile of stones in the middle of the trunk. And if the tree trunk or the tree dies, fells down, then you see this pile of stones that the praestorian would think that is work of humans. But in reality, in this case, there were chimpanzees doing that. Another publication we made was in another area in Guinea where we saw along rivers, a lot of long sticks that were laying on the ground and placing cameras. We realized that the chimpanzees were coming in the dry season to these river beds where inside the rivers, you could see the algae is growing and they were taking sticks sometimes very long up to four meters long and inserting them in the water, twisting it like that with the ankle, they would take the algeas and eat them. And some individuals would eat up to an hour of these algeas which is a huge amount of algeas. So that was two unexpected discoveries showing how we are possibly underestimating all the diversity of the behavior the chimpanzees are doing. So the relevance of our findings is that we are still very much underestimating chimpanzee culture. But the real point there is that many people have worked on chimpanzee culture, have tried to understand how chimpanzees learn from others, how they acquire a behavior and this has all been done in captivity. And so this type of studies allows maybe some very detailed analysis of some of this transmission but are totally separated from the real context where our culture happens. And we as human, we cannot decide what a chimpanzee would do in a given environment. And it's only by going out there having hours and hours of observation that we will discover that in some populations they will not fish for the algeas, where in others they will fish. Is that due to adaptation to different conditions which is a normal phenomenon you would see in all animal species? Or is that really culture in the sense that it is something that is socially determined and specific to such a social group? And this is in this context, what we see now in this new project is that we have to open the way of looking at chimpanzee culture by seeing that it can address many different aspects. Some are feeding behavior which we knew but the stone throwing is something very different that we didn't expect. And it's also raising the question, why do they do that? Why do they accumulate these stones in these tree trunks? Because some of the videos are very clear. You see the chimpanzees has a stone in their hand and is throwing it inside the tree trunk. So there are something, is that a ritual? Is that something similar to what we see in humans? Or is it very different? I have no answer to that but it's throwing new questions about some of the aspects we thought we already knew very well. And just to open a little bit the window to this ongoing project, we have also seen in another context in the termite fishing, for example, that there may be an accumulation of different cultural traits along this way how to fish for termites. So we are also coming into this question, how much of the behavior we see in chimpanzee culture is resulting from a cumulative process as we see so often in human culture? And so it's opening new questions about what is specific to human culture on one side and what is chimpanzee culture? The outlook of the project are two-fold. Is one is to finish the ongoing field studies that we have now. And the other one is now to work on the hundreds of thousands of video clips we have to document all this different behavior and the new that may come. And this hundreds of thousands of videos is stretching our abilities as a small research institution so that we have actually put it on the citizen science of the web so to have the public who is interested to participate in analyzing the video clips. And this has been a great help for many aspects because they allow us to go through the data much more quickly and identify the interesting videos that when we can concentrate on it. One of the motivation of our project to start with was the sad reality that nature is disappearing everywhere. And the wild animals, including wild chimpanzees are threatened in their survival. And in many places we went for this project. We arrived either too late, the nature was gone, the chimps were gone or we arrived in such situation that it was for the security becoming extremely difficult. So we had really to fight to be able to have 40 different sites. If we had planned 80, I'm not sure we would have been able to do it. So it's also a representation of where we stand as researcher who are interested in knowing what is going on in nature. We are fighting in a situation where we are running against time, nature is being destroyed and we are a small observer there trying to collect the data before it is too late. And so I hope with this project we can also underline clearly to the big audience the value of studying nature before it disappears.