For the parents who have been wondering, "Why is it that my
daughter plays with dolls and my son just wants a toy fire
truck?" scientists reported this week that they've seen
something similar among chimpanzees in a forest in Uganda. The
scientists say they've observed young, female chimps playing
with sticks and logs as though they were dolls. For 23 years,
Richard Wrangham has been part of a team of scientists studying
wild chimpanzees in a national park in Uganda. The team would
sometimes see young chimps pick up sticks and carry them around.
But Wrangham, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard,
didn't think too much about it at first. But one day in 1993,
his team saw a young male chimp carry a short log into a nest in
a tree. The chimp lay down, put the log on the palm of his
upturned hand, and flew it back and forth, back and forth. "It
really looked just like a chimp or a human mother playing the
airplane game, saying 'wee, wee' as it goes from side to side,"
Wrangham said. And every once in