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It was both fascinating and appalling to learn that chimpanzees were capable of hostile and territorial behavior that was not unlike certain forms of primitive human warfare.

Male chimpanzees have an extraordinarily strong drive for dominance. They're constantly jockeying for position.

When you meet chimps you meet individual personalities. When a baby chimp looks at you it's just like a human baby. We have a responsibility to them.

Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.

I learned from my dog long before I went to Gombe that we weren't the only beings with personalities. What the chimps did was help me to persuade others.

Chimps can do all sorts of things we thought that only we could do - like tool-making and abstraction and generalisation. They can learn a language - sign language - and they can use the signs. But when you think of our intellects, even the brightest chimp looks like a very small child.

When it was time to meet a chimpanzee, I got very, very anxious because they have the strength of ten men, so I hear.

Chimps cannot tell us anything about peaceful relations, because chimps have only different degrees of hostility between communities. Whereas bonobos do tell us something; they tell us about the possibility of having peaceful relationships.

I think if you're good and you can persuade people you're going to be able to do that role and ultimately the audience buys it, then it doesn't matter whether you were really a chimpanzee in disguise! You've done it.

If you look at human society, it is very easy, of course, to compare our warfare and territoriality with the chimpanzee. But that's only one side of what we do. We also trade, we intermarry, we allow each other to travel through our territory. There's an enormous amount of cooperation.