Les chimpanzés chassent à la lance

http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070219/full/070219-11.html

Chimpanzees can hunt with spears, say researchers who have seen wild chimps in the grasslands of Senegal. The innovative apes fashion weapons from sticks to kill bushbabies.

The discovery was made in chimps living in savannah dotted with trees. This is similar to the habitat in which humans are thought to have evolved, meaning that the chimp's behaviour may shed light on our ancestors' early hunting strategies.

Although chimps are known to use tools to get food - most notably using sticks to 'fish' for termites - the use of weapons to kill prey was thought to be uniquely human.

The spear-fashioning behaviour was seen in a group of chimps (Pan troglodytes) living at Fongoli, Senegal. "I was amazed every time I saw it," says Jill Pruetz of Iowa State University, Ames, who made the discovery with her colleague Paco Bertolani of the University of Cambridge, UK.