Daybreak is sudden and swift. Cued by the dawn, thirty-four chimpanzees awaken.
They are still in the nests they built the previous night, in trees at edge of an open plateau.
These are savanna-woodland chimps, found in eastern Senegal and across the border in western Mali. Unlike their better-know rain forest kin, savanna-woodland chimps spend most of their day on the ground.There is no tree canopy here. The trees are low and grow sparsely. it's an environment very much like the open, scratchy terrain where earl humans evolved. For this reason, chimpanzee communities like the Fongoli group are uniquely valuable to scientists who study the origins of our species.