I Drill; Therefore, I Am. Chimpanzees Seem to Agree.

et another species barrier has been broken. Chimpanzees have been videotaped with tool kits. Not just sticks, mind you, but three different kinds of sticks for different purposes, some modified (by chewing on the end, for instance) to make them more efficient.

We've known for a while that some other species, like the great apes and crows, use rudimentary tools, but just as a few adjectives are not the same as a sonnet, one stick does not a tool kit make.

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I know what I'm talking about. For someone who doesn't do much work around the house, I have a lot of tools. I've always felt that this was a kind of tribute to my evolutionary heritage.

Tool use is a defining characteristic of the human lineage and, I tell those who wonder why I can't use the wrenches we already have to fix the faucets, I'm every bit as human as all the other people I see shopping for pipe wrenches and pipe on Saturday morning.

I have the regular hammers and screwdrivers and electric drills, of course, all of which I used extensively when I tried, over the course of the summer to rehang a screen door. I didn't succeed, but using tools is what makes you human. Nobody ever said you had to be good at it. I also have a variety of tools that are remnants of old habits and interests, like the vintage drawknives I bought on eBay when I was carving yew staves into long bows (a lot easier than hanging a screen door.)

But, no matter what others may say, the point here is not that I have spent a lot of money accumulating a lot of tools that I don't use much any more. The point is that when I'm waiting in the endless line at the home improvement store with the other humans and their tools, it makes me feel like I'm really part of something special, Homo sapiens - the only creature that buys random orbital sanders.

One can't ignore these new tool collecting apes, however. In the current issue of The American Naturalist three researchers have published "New Insights Into Chimpanzees, Tools and Termites From the Congo Basin." Crickette Sanz of Washington University in St. Louis and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany; Dave Morgan of Cambridge University and the Wildlife Conservation Society; and Steve Gulick of Wildland Security used remote cameras set at termite mounds to get hours of videotape of chimps catching and eating termites.

The chimps in the videos have three tools, a heavy puncturing stick, a lighter perforating stick and a light, flexible fishing stick. A chimp heading to a subterranean mound of termites will bring a strong puncturing stick and a lighter fishing stick. A chimp going to a mound above ground will use a lighter-weight perforating stick and an even lighter one to fish with.

When the colonies are underground the chimps first poke the strong puncturing stick into the ground, with hands and one foot, looking for all the world like gardeners using a spade. For an above-ground mound the chimps use a lighter stick to punch holes in the mound. The researchers call this a perforating stick.

When the puncturing or perforating is done the chimps sit down by a hole they've made and use the lightweight fishing stick, which has one end crushed to make a sort of brush. As the termites rush to the breach, the chimp dips the fishing stick into the mound, pulls it out with termites clinging to it, and lips them off.

As they are feeding the chimps look like browsers at a buffet spearing shrimp, with slightly distracted but self-satisfied faces. That, however, is not a cultural breakthrough. No one who has been to a buffet table would characterize the human behavior that occurs there as evolutionarily advanced.

There is likely to be some academic dispute about whether these are true tool kits or perhaps something else, like fishing equipment. Perhaps. They might be more similar to garden tools than carpenter's tools, which means I suppose that chimps are headed toward a Smith & Hawken-based material culture.

Mind you, I'm not saying that chimps are truly human. People not only use tools, they develop a desire for them in and of themselves, apart from their usefulness. When I order a vintage Yankee screwdriver online or buy an old drawknife on eBay because the steel takes an edge well, I'm indulging myself. To use tools is human, to buy from the Garrett Wade catalog is making a fetish of a simple enterprise.

Maybe having fetishes is what sets us apart from the other animals. No one has ever seen a chimp, in the wild, in Manolo Blahnik shoes with ice pick toes, even though they might be just the thing for perforating termite mounds. Not yet.

That's a videotape I will have to see.

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