We know two things. First, chimps were once more widely distributed. And second, these environments have changed dramatically in the last half million years. The chimps and all the other forest loving animals that lived with them became extinct, locally, because of this change.
"Nina G. Jablonski" is an American anthropologist and palaeobiology/palaeobiologist, known for her research into the evolution of skin color in humans. She is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University, and the author of Skin: a Natural History and Living Color: the Biological and Social History of Skin Colour.
More Nina Jablonski on Wikipedia.We know today if you go to western and central Africa that humans and chimps live in similar and neighboring environments. This is the first evidence in the fossil record that they coexisted in the same place in the past.
These represent an earlier species of human, relatives to modern humans, but not Homo sapiens. There's some controversy over what this species is called. Most would call it an advanced form of Homo erectus. They looked like people and were a fairly sophisticated culture with various stone tools and lived in the same environment as humans.
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