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Africans have had contact with chimpanzees for millennia. Chimpanzees have been kept as pets for centuries in a few African villages, especially in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In Virunga National Park in the east of the country, the park authorities regularly confiscate chimpanzees from people keeping them as pets.[50]The first recorded contact of Europeans with chimps took place in present-dayAngola during the 17th century. The diary of Portuguese explorer Duarte Pacheco Pereira (1506), preserved in the Portuguese National Archive (Torre do Tombo), is probably the first European document to acknowledge chimpanzees built their own rudimentary tools.
The first use of the name "chimpanzee", however, did not occur until 1738. The name is derived from a
Tshiluba language term kivili-chimpenze, which is the local name for the animal and translates loosely as "mockman" or possibly just "ape". The colloquialism "chimp" was most likely coined some time in the late 1870s.[51] Biologists applied Pan as the genus name of the animal. Chimps, as well as other apes, had also been purported to have been known to Western writers in ancient times, but mainly as myths and legends on the edge of European and Arab societal consciousness, mainly through fragmented and sketchy accounts of European adventurers. Apes are mentioned variously by Aristotle, as well as the English Bible, where they are described as having been collected by Solomon. (1 Kings 10:22. However the Hebrew word, qőf, may mean a monkey.) Apes are mentioned in the Qur'an (7:166), where God tells Israelites who transgressed Shabbat "Be ye apes". The first of these early transcontinental chimpanzees came from Angola and were presented as a gift to Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange in 1640, and were followed by a few of its brethren over the next several years. Scientists described these first chimpanzees as "pygmies", and noted the animals' distinct similarities to humans. The next two decades, a number of the creatures were imported into Europe, mainly acquired by various zoological gardens as entertainment for visitors.