Toshisada Nishida

Toshisada Nishida (March 3, 1941 – June 7, 2011) established one of the first long term chimpanzee field research sites, in 1965, and was the first to discover that, instead of forming nuclear family-like arrangements, chimpanzees live a communal life with territorial boundaries. He also laid the basis for the new field of zoopharmacognosy on discovering the potentially medicinal use of plants by wild chimpanzees. He was full professor in the Zoology Department of Kyoto University. Toshisada Nishida received the Leakey Prize for his accomplishments in human evolutionary science.

Toshisada Nishida started his career inspired by the legendary father of Japanese primatology, Kinji Imanishi, at Kyoto University. As a graduate student of Imanishi's successor, Junichiro Itani, Nishida first studied Japanese macaques before he travelled to Tanzania.

In the 1960s, chimpanzees did not yet occupy the special place in science on human evolution reserved for them today. Baboons were considered the best model of human evolution, since baboons had descended from the trees to become savanna-dwellers, like our ancestors. 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. Chimpanzees show all of them. Early primatologists had seen chimpanzees travel through the trees, eating fruits at their leisure, but rarely noticed anything of interest in their behaviour. This was partly due to low visibility and the apes' wariness of people.

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