Toshisada Nishida (1941–2011): Chimpanzee Rapport

One of the absolute greats of primatology, Toshisada Nishida (March 3, 1941– June 7, 2011), recently passed away at the age of 70 (Figure 1). We have come such a long way in our knowledge of chimpanzees, and the discoveries have reached us in such a gradual and cumulative fashion, that it is easy to forget how little was known when Nishida set out for Africa to establish one of the first chimpanzee field sites, in 1965. At the time, chimpanzees did not yet occupy the special place in our thinking about human evolution reserved for them today. Science considered baboons the best model of human evolution, since baboons had descended from the trees to become savanna-dwellers, like our ancestors. These rambunctious monkeys, however, are genetically more distant from us, and many of the characteristics deemed important for human evolution are either absent or minimally developed, such as tool technology, cooperative hunting, food sharing, territoriality, cultural traditions, and certain cognitive capacities, such as planning and theory-of-mind. Chimpanzees show all of them. Early primatologists had seen chimpanzees travel through the trees, eating fruits at their leisure, but rarely noticed anything of interest in their behavior. This was partly due to low visibility and the apes’ wariness of people. The study of chimpanzee behavior in nature began in earnest only in the 1960s with one field site set up by Jane Goodall in Gombe Stream, and another one 120 km to the south by Japanese scientists led by Nishida. Both teams were in it for the long haul rather than the brief expeditions others had previously undertaken. Nishida started his career inspired by the legendary father of Japanese primatology, Kinji Imanishi, at Kyoto University. As a graduate student of Imanishi’s successor, Junichiro Itani, Nishida first studied Japanese macaques before he traveled to Tanzania. He chose a forest in the foothills of the Mahale Mountains, at Lake Tanganyika, where he waited patiently for chimpanzees at a patch of sugar cane planted to attract them. The primates started to make regular visits only after about six months. Based on his field observations, Nishida defended his dissertation at Kyoto University in 1968. He occupied a teaching position at Tokyo University, from 1969 until 1988, before he became Full Professor in the Zoology Department of Kyoto University from 1988 until 2004. After his retirement from this position, he became Director of the Japan Monkey Center. One of Nishida’s first discoveries was truly groundbreaking. While science still described the chimpanzee as a peaceful vegetarian that roamed the forest without any need for social bonds—not unlike Rousseau’s noble savages—Nishida had noticed that chimpanzees live a communal life with territorial boundaries and perhaps even hostility between neighboring unitgroups. This was not an easy discovery, because chimpanzees are often encountered alone or in small groups in the forest. One can determine community relations only if one recognizes all individuals and keeps careful track of their travels. Nishida’s discovery upset not only Western notions of chimpanzees as individualists, but also the expectations of his Japanese mentors who thought chimpanzees would live, like humans, in nuclear family–like arrangements. Debate about what to Figure 1. Toshisada Nishida in a Kyoto temple, in 2007. Photograph by Frans de Waal. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001185.g001