Mischief makers behind church — they're little monkeys

Usage examples of chimps.

He drew a hierarchy that began with God and ran downward through human beings and chimpanzees to dogs and cats and onward to insects and frogs, by way of giving the chimps some sense of the great chain of life.

The brightest of the chimps saw right away that something was amiss with Vendelmans, and started making odd remarks.

Their life cycles clearly and understandably came to an end and they died and the chimps understood it.

These chimps have lived in a closed environment here for decades, and the culture they have evolved is a product of what we have chosen to teach them, compounded by their own innate chimpness plus whatever we have unknowingly transmitted to them about ourselves or them.

If the plan is to observe a community of intelligent primates over a period of many human generations, studying the changes in their intellectual capacity as their linguistic skills increase, then we must at all times take care to let them find things out for themselves, rather than skewing our data by giving the chimps more than their current concept-processing abilities may be able to handle.

Judy was trying to look radiant too, working at it, but her grief kept breaking through: once I saw her turn away from the chimps and press her knuckles to her teeth to hold it back.

He is the oldest of the chimps, gray-haired, going bald, a deep thinker.

Even so, of course, our presence among the chimps is bound to have its impact, but we do what we can to minimize it by avoiding leading questions and watching in silence.

We ourselves communicate mainly in signs when we are talking to each other while working with the chimps, and even in our humans-only conferences, we use signs as much as speech, from long habit.

Humans do, too, when speaking with chimps, but when humans talk to humans, they use their voices.

Meat is not very important in the diet of chimps, but they do like to have some, and as far back as I can remember, Wednesday has been meat-day here, when we give them a side of beef or some slabs of mutton or something of that sort.

A dozen or more of the other adult chimps were squatting in a semicircle in front of them.

The male chimps were doing a bizarre dance, roaring, swaying, slapping their feet against the ground, hammering their hands against the trunks of the trees, ripping off branches and flailing the earth with them.

Perhaps after a time our chimps will lose interest in being religious, and go on to other pastimes.

New, specialized hip joints arose, a design that enabled them to lift one leg off the ground without losing their balance, as chimps would, so that they could walk without swaying.