Chimpanzees (Pan Troglodytes) are found across a central band of the continent of Africa in the following countries: Benin, Togo, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Mali, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Cameroon, Angola, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Congo, Gabon, Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania and Democratic Republic of Congo.
"For hundreds of years the apes have served as funhouse mirrors for what the human species once was, or perhaps might have been had evolution taken a different course. Among the four species of great apes, the chimpanzees have received the lion's share of attention as models of early humanity. Until the 1960s, however, when Jane Goodall first set out for Tanzania, we didn't know much about wild chimpanzees. What Goodall found shocked us: Chimpanzees were not only extremely clever, they also had complex societies and adept tool-using abilities, and they loved raw meat. In the decades that followed, field researchers observed other "human qualities" in wild chimpanzees: intercommunity warfare and lethal territorial aggression, cooperative hunting for other mammals (with the spoils of the hunt ritually shared and used as the bargaining chips of political and sexual barter), and the manufacture and use of tools made of plant products and, at some sites, of stone! These studies turned our view of chimpanzees (and of ourselves) on its head."