Social anthropology is, by definition, the study of human society. But what if we were to broaden the definition to take in chimpanzee society as well? And what if we could extrapolate from studies that have been made of chimpanzee society (by primatologists, not by social anthropologists) and compare these to studies of human society, with a view to understanding the evolution of the human species from the time of our common ancestor with the chimpanzee? After all, social anthropology is by nature comparative. We understand the lifestyles of any given part of humanity through comparison to the lifestyles of other peoples or ethnic groups. Why not do the same for humanity as a whole, through comparison to the ways of hominid cousins? And what if we consider also insights from the last 150 years of social anthropological theory, and bring these in along with theoretical perspectives from primatology, psychology and other fields, to inform our understandings? Anthropological theory has hardly ever been used in the study of chimpanzees, and is still very little used in any coherent way in studies of human evolution.

For many biological anthropologists, studies of bonobos and common chimpanzees, both in the wild and experimentally, are the key to hominin or hominid evolution (that of humans and our ancestors). It has been known since the 1960s that chimps make tools for activities such as extracting termites from their nests, and there is compelling new evidence that chimps even make spears which they use to hunt other primates.