(ANIMALS SQUAWKING)
ATTENBOROUGH: In the great tree of life,
one branch of mammals has a particular fascination for us,
for we belong to it.
Primates.
Primate hands provide a firm grip
and forward-facing eyes accurately assess distance.
Both are crucial for a lifestyle that began in the trees.
Intelligence among primates can excel that of all other animals.
Primates can solve difficult problems,
develop thoughts and ideas
and build long-lasting relationships.
But most importantly,
primates remember what they learn during their lives.
This film reveals how intelligence helps our closest relatives
to tackle the many challenges of life.
There are more than 350 primate species on Earth.
Since they first appeared over 65 million years ago,
these clever animals have become adapted
to an extraordinary range of habitats.
The Awash region of southern Ethiopia.
A harsh, remote scrubland.
But primates have learned how to make it their home.
Hamadryas baboons are waking up
from a night spent high on the cliffs.
These monkeys live in groups up to 400 strong
with no single leader.
Theirs is a very complex society made up of dozens of small harems,
each governed by a male.
Every morning, they leave the safety of the cliffs to find food.
Top-ranking males lead the way.
They can be very severe with their females
if there is the slightest misdemeanour.
(SCREECHING)
(SQUEALING)
Despite their individual strength,
hamadryas baboons prefer to travel as a troop.
It's safer that way.
On this particular morning,
something stops them in their tracks.
Another troop is using these cliffs as a barracks.
(ALL SQUEALING)
More than a thousand baboons can overnight here
and a rival faction is heading directly their way.
In the chaos of warfare, males settle old scores.
This is also their best chance of stealing females.
When the fighting is over, the harems reform.
Lead males punish any of their females who had dared to stray.
(SQUEALING)
Strict discipline is essential if order is to be maintained.
It's a harsh social system,
but it works for hamadryas baboons, here on these arid plains.
In other parts of the world,
primates have had to organise their societies in a different way
to cope with different challenges.
Mid-winter in the Japanese Alps.
The Kamikochi Valley is the haunt of the most northerly dwelling monkeys.
To live here, you must be able to survive temperatures
which plunge to minus 20 centigrade.
The Japanese macaque.
Dense, thick layers of fur
help to insulate these snow monkeys in this testing environment.
But they still feel the cold.
At this time of the year, food is scarce.
But macaques are adaptable and clever.
The troop has learnt that this river stays ice-free the year round.
This female knows it's a good place
to gather insect larvae from under the rocks,
using her versatile hands and nimble fingers.
In winter, this troop spends most of its time searching for food.
The same underground forces that prevent this river from freezing
bring great comfort to others.
The Japanese Alps were built by volcanoes.
Many of them are still active.
And in a region called Hell's Valley,
some snow monkeys have found the perfect winter resort.
A thermal spa, where the water temperature
is a blissful 41 degrees centigrade.
Everyone wants in but primates being primates,
there are poolside politics.
(SCREECHING)
This is an exclusive, members-only club.
Only the highest-ranking females and infants are allowed in.
Everyone obeys this male,
who guards the pool and vets the entrants.
These youngsters, born of the right bloodline,
don't know how privileged they are.
Lower-ranking individuals are literally left out in the cold.
Japanese macaque society is very divided.
There are those that have and those that have not.
And that is a harsh division,
because the 60 degrees that separate the steaming water
from the freezing surroundings
can make the difference between life and death.
But by far, the majority of primate species
live in warm, tropical forests.
Among them are the largest of all.
Gorillas live in stable family groups
with just a single leader.
A silverback male.
This one, here in the Congo Basin, is the guardian of his family,
which includes five females and their infants.
(GRUNTING)
He has the responsibility of protecting them from the dangers
that abound on the forest floor where they feed.
To sustain his huge size, he must consume up to 30 kilos a day.
It's mostly plant food,
but western gorillas also enjoy a sprinkling of termites.
The youngsters need to eat far less than their father,
so they've got time on their hands.
They like to play for the same reasons we do,
for fun.
And it helps build long-lasting relationships.
Their protector keeps a watchful eye on them.
But then,
it's time for his siesta.
(GRUNTING)
(WHOOPING IN DISTANCE)
Something shatters the peace.
This silverback's territory is one of the best,
but it has borders with at least eight other gorilla groups.
(DISTANT WHOOPING CONTINUES)
(CHEST-BEATING IN DISTANCE)
The sound of chest-beating
travels more than a mile through the tangled understory.
It's a territorial drumbeat.
Everyone must know who is boss around here.
Other, smaller primates are rather more secretive.
One of the most unusual is found in Sulawesi, Indonesia.
It lives among the aerial roots of this strangler fig.
Its ancestors were daytime hunters,
but they found that there was less competition
if they looked for food in the twilight.
Now they only stir after dark.
Nonetheless, there's a lot of insect food around.
The spectral tarsier.
Tarsiers are the only totally carnivorous primates on Earth.
They've hardly changed in 45 million years.
Their huge eyes can see in even the faintest light.
These eyeballs are so wide they can't swivel in their sockets.
Tarsiers have to rotate their heads.
(INSECTS CHIRPING)
Their mobile ears can detect the faintest sounds.
And their powerful legs enable them to jump 40 times their own length.
The family group fans out to hunt.
Prey is not hard to find.
But the tarsiers must be watchful.
For a primate just five inches tall,
life in the forest is full of danger.
(SQUEAKS)
The male sounds the alarm.
(TARSIER SQUEAKING)
And everyone retreats.
Back in their family tree,
the senior male and female send out piercing calls.
These calls guide any stragglers home
and there they renew the family bonds.
Good communication
is one of the hallmarks of primate society.
(MELODIC WHOOPING)
Few communicate more musically
than lar gibbons in the forests of Thailand.
(WHOOPING ECHOES)
Their songs carry for many miles across the canopy,
proclaiming that this piece of forest is theirs.
Most primates have excellent colour vision
and colour, too, can be used in communication.
Adult Phayre's leaf monkeys might seem rather drab.
But not so their newborn.
Bright orange fur makes the babies very conspicuous
so the adults can easily keep an eye on them.
Close friends and relatives
are eager to help the mother with babysitting.
It's a good chance for the younger ones to practise parenting.
As a result, the baby is never left on its own for long.
When it's a few months old and more independent,
it will turn the colour of its mother
and blend in with the group.
But until then, it can't be ignored.
Smell is of particular importance
to the primates that live in Madagascar,
the lemurs.
They have pointed snouts and wet noses.
These are ring-tail lemurs.
(SNIFFING)
The males have sharp pads on their wrists
with which they scratch the trunks of young trees.
Glands on their wrists
impregnate the cut bark with a pungent smell
that acts as a territorial marker.
Females make smelly marks in their own way.
This one's scent carries another signal as well as the territorial one.
It tells males that she is coming into heat.
But she will only be sexually receptive for 24 hours or less.
So tensions run high among the males.
(SQUEAKING)
Amid the commotion, some males sneak off.
They have anointed their tails with scent
and waft it towards her
in an attempt to persuade her to mate.
She's ready...
but fussy.
This male adds more of his wrist gland perfume to his tail.
It seems to work, for they leave the party together.
And he wafts his way to victory.
A willingness to mate is a relatively straightforward message.
But primates are capable of much more complex communication.
It starts between a mother and her baby.
The rainforests of Sumatra.
This female orang-utan is 42 years old.
Her third child, her six-year-old daughter,
is still with her.
Orangs look after their children
for longer than any other primate except ourselves.
It will take her nine years to teach her youngster
everything she needs to know about this complex treetop world.
She must learn how to collect ants and termites.
How to identify at least 200 kinds of edible plants
and how to avoid the poisonous ones.
And how to judge when fruit, like this durian, has ripened to perfection.
A child must be able to judge which branches can carry her weight.
And which insect nests are safe to raid.
Building up a complete guide to the foods of the forest is a long process.
Her lessons, of course, aren't limited to food.
There are other crucial skills she must learn
if she is to survive in the treetops.
Building a secure nest in which to spend the night, for example,
takes years of practice.
And this is, of course, a rainforest.
(THUNDER RUMBLING)
So all orangs must learn how to make a shelter early in their lives.
It rains almost every day,
so this six-year-old has already had plenty of practice.
She might live to be 50 years old.
And if she too becomes a mother,
she'll pass on all this expertise to her own children.
Remembering your lessons is a vital part of primate life.
It's not just learning how to exploit your environment,
just as important is knowing when to do so.
This is Africa's Cape Peninsula.
It's the furthest south that monkeys have managed to settle.
There's a wide range of plant food here
but because the soil is so poor in nutrients,
chacma baboons find it difficult to get the range of sustenance they need,
however much they eat.
So they have had to become quite adventurous in what they will tackle.
The waters around the Cape are among the richest in the world.
And the wily baboons have become tidal experts.
If you rely on the tides to expose your food,
you have to work to fairly tight schedules.
Every two weeks, on the lowest spring tide,
there's a chance to collect something really special.
What they've been waiting for is hidden among the fronds of seaweed.
Shark eggs.
Each one is only a tiny mouthful
but there are lots of them and they're so nutritious,
it's worth the trouble.
But the baboons can't stay long. The tide is turning.
So now they switch their attention to the main course of the day, mussels.
This delicacy is exposed every day by every tide.
Baboons have powerful jaws and huge canines,
ideal for cracking shells.
Timing is an essential skill
if you're to harvest all the food that becomes available
at one time or another around a coast.
Some foods, however, are only available to those who have skilful hands
and sharp intelligence.
On the coast of Costa Rica, among the mangroves,
live some of the most intelligent monkeys
in the whole of the Americas.
White-faced capuchins.
They too have learnt to work the tides.
They are after clams.
But capuchins are quite small
and don't have the brawn to open such shellfish.
But they do have the brain.
And they've devised an ingenious way to solve the problem.
They hammer the clams.
They're not trying to crack the shells,
all this pounding and rolling has another purpose,
to tire the muscle with which the clam is holding itself shut.
(SPLASHING)
(SHELL CRACKING)
Eventually, the clam can hold out no longer
and the capuchin gets its reward.
(INSECT BUZZING)
Trial and error
may have been sufficient to solve this particular problem.
But one of their cousins in Brazil has taken things a step further.
Brown-tufted capuchins
combine manual dexterity with considerable intelligence.
And they have learned to use tools,
hammerstones with which to open palm nuts.
Some of the stones are nearly half the weight of the monkey.
Without a tool, opening these nuts would be an impossible task.
Tool-using was a major breakthrough in primate evolution.
And nowhere is it more convincingly displayed
than here in the forest of Bossou in Guinea, West Africa.
(WHOOPING)
(SCREECHING)
Chimpanzees in this small community of 13 individuals
use tools in a variety of ways.
The most delicate is the way they use a twig or a leaf stem to dip for ants.
Some of their skills are unique to this particular group.
One of these involves stripping a palm leaf frond
and using it like a pestle to mash up the nutritious palm heart.
This four-year-old is learning fast. She needs to.
If chimpanzees haven't learnt particular skills by the age of eight,
they never seem able to acquire them.
The most impressive skill of all, which involves nimble fingers,
hand-eye coordination and intelligence, is nut-cracking.
Chimpanzees have gone a stage further than capuchins.
They have learned how to carefully position the nut on an anvil
and to judge how much force to use
in order to crack the shell but not smash the kernel to pieces.
Their use of tools is both efficient and precise.
This 11-year-old female has an anvil but can't find a hammer.
She approaches a male to see if he will lend her his.
He obliges.
Chimpanzees can show great kindness and compassion.
Sharing,
experimenting,
empathy,
planning,
intelligence,
teaching
and learning.
Behaviour so characteristic of us higher primates.
We are the most inventive and innovative of all primates,
just one branch of a large and extended family,
a family which has refined the ability
to develop and pass on individual learning
to the next generation.
A family which is built on strong bonds between mother and baby.
A family with which we share so much.
To film the very best primate behaviour,
the Life team had to use all their primate ingenuity and adaptability.
And in doing so, they discovered an extraordinary affinity
with our extended family.
Especially with the great ape
with whom we share almost 99% of our genes,
the chimpanzee.
He was completely asleep just then,
he was just rocking to the side as if he might just fall off the branch.
You could see his lips were twitching like he was in a deep dream.
It was really beautiful.
ATTENBOROUGH: Chimpanzees are our closest relatives.
Justine Evans spent almost a month with them
in the forests of Guinea to film their use of tools.
The chimps have disappeared off down there,
they're going to cross over into another area of forest
and hopefully start using some tools.
Go and use tools, that's what we're here for.
ATTENBOROUGH: Chimpanzees have to accept you.
If they don't want to be filmed, they'll simply disappear.
Justine needed the expert guidance of Tatyana Humle,
a primatologist who's spent more than 10 years
studying these individuals.
So, when we see them, always keep calm
and don't stare at them straight into the eyes.
EVANS: Have you ever had problems
with them coming right up and being aggressive?
No, never, never. I mean, it's pretty rare, so...
I don't know what to expect, 'cause I've never seen them in the wild before.
- So it's a first for me. - Okay.
HUMLE: Just always stay calm and if one of them walks by really close...
- Yeah. - ...just ignore them.
One particularly young male might throw sticks.
Ignore him as well, it's like, he's like a kid.
- Right. - He just wants attention,
so he'll just keep doing it.
We've got to put these face masks on,
in case we pass on any infectious diseases.
Quite a few chimps have died in the past from respiratory diseases
in other study sites, so it's very important.
(CHIMPANZEES SCREECHING)
That's Gigi.
ATTENBOROUGH: Justine was finding her way with the chimps.
But it would take time.
It's never easy anticipating their behaviour.
Trying to get ready really quickly
because we're expecting some chimps to come down
the path straight ahead of me.
It would be lovely if they emerge out into this clearing.
'Cause it's really difficult to see through all this foliage.
ATTENBOROUGH: Tatyana and her team were invaluable.
They introduced Justine to the chimps' different habits and characters.
(CHIMPANZEES HOOTING)
Soon the natural inquisitiveness of the chimps
overcame any worries they might have had of Justine.
In fact, they seemed fascinated by her and the tools of her trade.
But it was their use of tools that Justine was here to film.
And this was her first good opportunity.
EV ANS: As I filmed them fishing for ants,
I was amazed by their dexterity.
But holding focus in such low light
really tested my own coordination to the limit.
- She's just moving away. - HUMLE: She's moving.
It's been all go today.
It's not over yet. If we can get out of here,
into a more open area,
we'll actually have enough light to film by, 'cause the sun's still up.
But I don't know.
(CHIMPANZEES CHATTERING)
ATTENBOROUGH: Although Justine's main goal was to film tool use,
there was another piece of behaviour she really wanted to capture.
Buttress root drumming had never been filmed here before,
but she was always just a bit too late.
Back at yet another buttress
in the hope that we might get some sort of buttress drumming.
But it's started raining, which is an absolute pain.
ATTENBOROUGH: It's a waiting game.
Just staking out a couple of really big trees
that have got very large buttress roots,
in the hope that a male will come down and drum on them.
The drumming always happens somewhere else.
And apparently, it's usually the males that sort of sneak off to go and do it.
It feels like a bit of a long shot at the moment.
I have to have some patience.
ATTENBOROUGH: The thing about chimps is that, like most primates,
you can't always predict what they're going to do,
when they're going to do it or where.
You've just got to keep with them.
A different type of sound brought Justine back to her main mission.
(CRACKING)
(WHISPERING) Slowly. This way.
Nut-cracking.
This was the key sequence Justine was here to film.
EV ANS: Filming the chimps using tools
made me realise just how close to them we are.
I felt so similar to them.
By the end of our filming trip,
I was able to recognise most of the individuals in the group
and had begun to understand their different personalities.
For me, the most poignant moment of all
was when the male the scientist called Play
lent a female his tools.
I know that primates are very social animals
but seeing this act of generosity was something I'll never forget.
(DRUMMING)
(CHIMPANZEES SCREECHING)
EVANS: God! Watch it!
Just before we left, the chimpanzees finally put on the display
that I'd been hoping for.
(SCREECHING)
ATTENBOROUGH: In the great tree of life, we and chimpanzees
went our separate ways about six million years ago,
but they remain our closest living relatives.