One major advance in the study of chimpanzee habits came when Nishida discovered that wild chimpanzees consume Aspilia leaves.
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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 neighbouring unit-groups.
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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.
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Before scientists learned to analyse DNA from fecal or hair samples, the only way to determine kinship relations was to hunker down for the long term.