Chimpanzee! The hoots and calls I knew so well were echoing through the rainforest. I could hardly believe my luck. I had been here in this remote corner of south-east Cameroon for almost two years and it had proved so difficult to track these magnificent animals in the dense forest.

Heart in mouth, I crawled slowly through the undergrowth. Ahead, I could see movement. But it wasn’t a chimpanzee. It was better. There in the clearing, imitating a mother chimpanzee was my friend, Likano. Slung under his belly was his four-year-old son, Ali. Surely they were just playing games. But no, something else was happening – something that was to stand my own sense of education on its head.

Likano was one of the elders of a Baka Pygmy village I had been living in for two years making a documentary for Channel 4, back in 1985. As I watched them, Likano carefully broke off a twig and started to prod the holes of a terrestrial termite. Within seconds, a large fat juicy termite was clinging to the stick. Was this tonight’s supper? No, far from it. Likano was explaining to his son that this was a ‘worker’ termite, not a queen or a soldier and that this was how a chimpanzee mother would ‘fish’ for termites. So what, you might ask, is so interesting about that?

Well, when Jane Goodall made a similar observation during her groundbreaking study of chimpanzees, her conclusions rocked modern behavioural science. For she deduced that this was clear evidence of a non-human fashioning and using a ‘tool’ to gain an advantage. Up until the 1960s science had deemed this to be what made us, homo sapiens, unique in the animal kingdom – the ability to fashion tools, to make technology and shape our destiny.

It just so happens that the Baka made this observation many hundreds, if not thousands, of years before. Not only that, but they deemed it important enough to hand down the knowledge from father to son – in just the way that was happening before my very eyes. Likano was passing on to little Ali not only knowledge but also respect for the chimpanzee and the forest world she lived in.

During our time with the Baka we grew to love and respect our new-found friends as the people they really were – not as anthropological curiosities, nor victims of a cultural ‘dead end’ but as sophisticated people living a dynamic, interactive life with the forest around them.