
Head researcher Michel Tama Sadiakhou observes a West African chimpanzee with a baby on her back on the Fongoli home range in the Kedougou region, on December 10, 2025. For five area residents originally from local villages, all but one without a high school degree, a project focused on the area's highly unusual savannah-dwelling chimpanzees has proven an escape from the mines, and a deep dive into science. The group of rare chimpanzees they research live in the bush instead of the forest alongside other chimp communities in Senegal's Kedougou region, on the border with Mali and Guinea. The Fongoli females are the only documented animals in the world to regularly hunt with tools, fashioning branches into spears for killing smaller primates known as a bush babies. (Photo by PATRICK MEINHARDT / AFP via Getty Images)

