since then, much has been learned about chimpanzees, such as that they hunt and eat meat, that they raid neighbouring territories, that they have complex tool skill s that differ from group to group, that they medicate themselves with plants, that males engage in power politics while competing over status and females, and so on. the list of discoveries is impressive and the mahale field site has been central in furnishing the evidence. from the start, the approach followed at mahale has been that of imanishi, who urged his students to identify individuals, give them names, and follow them over time. not just for weeks or months, as done previously, but for years and years, so that one could understand the kinship relations within the community. with a species that breeds as slowly and is as long-lived as the chimpanzee, one needs to follow individuals for a long time indeed to know whether or not two adult males are brothers or how many offspring a female rears during her lifetime. before scientists learned to analyse dna from fecal or hair samples, the only way to determine kinship relations was to hunker down for the long term.