JANE GOODALL AND THE CHIMPANZEES IN TANZANIA

Jane Morris Goodall

Today, The Grandma has stopped her English homework to pay tribute to one of the most important scientific of all times, an old friend and one of the most respected women in science: Jane Goodall. 

On a day like today, in 1960, Jane Goodall went to Gombe Stream National Park in Tanganyika, to study social life of wild chimpanzees. Then, the legend started...

Dame Jane Morris Goodall, 3 April 1934, formerly Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall, is an English primatologist and anthropologist. Considered to be the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees, Goodall is best known for her over 55-year study of social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees since she first went to Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania in 1960. 

She is the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and the Roots & Shoots programme, and she has worked extensively on conservation and animal welfare issues. She has served on the board of the Nonhuman Rights Project since its founding in 1996. In April 2002, she was named a UN Messenger of Peace. 

More information: The Jane Goodall Institute

Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall was born in 1934 in Hampstead, to Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall, a businessman, and Margaret Myfanwe Joseph, a novelist who wrote under the name Vanne Morris-Goodall.

Jane Goodall and a little chimpanzee

As a child, as an alternative to a teddy bear her father gave Goodall a stuffed chimpanzee named Jubilee, and she has said her fondness for this figure started her early love of animals, commenting that My mother's friends were horrified by this toy, thinking it would frighten me and give me nightmares. Today, Jubilee still sits on Goodall's dresser in London.

Goodall had always been passionate about animals and Africa, which brought her to the farm of a friend in the Kenya highlands in 1957. From there, she obtained work as a secretary, and acting on her friend's advice, she telephoned Louis Leakey, the notable Kenyan archaeologist and palaeontologist, with no other thought than to make an appointment to discuss animals.  

Leakey, believing that the study of existing great apes could provide indications of the behaviour of early hominids, was looking for a chimpanzee researcher, though he kept the idea to himself. Instead, he proposed that Goodall work for him as a secretary. After obtaining approval from his wife Mary Leakey, Louis sent Goodall to Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, where he laid out his plans.

More information: My Life with the Wild Chimpanzees by Jane Goodall

In 1958, Leakey sent Goodall to London to study primate behaviour with Osman Hill and primate anatomy with John Napier. Leakey raised funds, and on 14 July 1960, Goodall went to Gombe Stream National Park, becoming the first of what would come to be called The Trimates. She was accompanied by her mother, whose presence was necessary to satisfy the requirements of David Anstey, chief warden, who was concerned for their safety; Tanzania was Tanganyika at that time and a British protectorate.

Jane Goodall and a little chimpanzee

Leakey arranged funding and in 1962, he sent Goodall, who had no degree, to Cambridge University. She went to Newnham College, and obtained a PhD degree in ethology. 

She became the eighth person to be allowed to study for a PhD there without first having obtained a BA or BSc. Her thesis was completed in 1965 under the tutorship of Robert Hinde, titled Behaviour of free-living chimpanzees, detailing her first five years of study at the Gombe Reserve.

Goodall is best known for her study of chimpanzee social and family life. She began studying the Kasakela chimpanzee community in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania, in 1960. Without collegiate training directing her research, Goodall observed things that strict scientific doctrines may have overlooked. Instead of numbering the chimpanzees she observed, she gave them names such as Fifi and David Greybeard, and observed them to have unique and individual personalities, an unconventional idea at the time. 

More information: British Council

She found that, it isn't only human beings who have personality, who are capable of rational thought and emotions like joy and sorrow. She also observed behaviours such as hugs, kisses, pats on the back, and even tickling, what we consider human actions. 

Jane Goodall and a chimpanzee

Goodall insists that these gestures are evidence of the close, supportive, affectionate bonds that develop between family members and other individuals within a community, which can persist throughout a life span of more than 50 years. 

These findings suggest that similarities between humans and chimpanzees exist in more than genes alone, but can be seen in emotion, intelligence, and family and social relationships.

Goodall's research at Gombe Stream is best known to the scientific community for challenging two long-standing beliefs of the day: that only humans could construct and use tools, and that chimpanzees were vegetarians. 

More information: National Geographic

While observing one chimpanzee feeding at a termite mound, she watched him repeatedly place stalks of grass into termite holes, then remove them from the hole covered with clinging termites, effectively fishing for termites. The chimps would also take twigs from trees and strip off the leaves to make the twig more effective, a form of object modification which is the rudimentary beginnings of toolmaking. Humans had long distinguished ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom as Man the Toolmaker. 

In response to Goodall's revolutionary findings, Louis Leakey wrote, We must now redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human!

Jane Goodall and a baby chimpanzee

In 1977, Goodall established the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI), which supports the Gombe research, and she is a global leader in the effort to protect chimpanzees and their habitats. 

With nineteen offices around the world, the JGI is widely recognised for community-centred conservation and development programs in Africa. Its global youth program, Roots & Shoots began in 1991 when a group of 16 local teenagers met with Goodall on her back porch in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. They were eager to discuss a range of problems they knew about from first-hand experience that caused them deep concern. The organisation now has over 10,000 groups in over 100 countries.

Goodall credits the 1986 Understanding Chimpanzees conference, hosted by the Chicago Academy of Sciences, with shifting her focus from observation of chimpanzees to a broader and more intense concern with animal-human conservation. She is the former president of Advocates for Animals, an organisation based in Edinburgh, Scotland, that campaigns against the use of animals in medical research, zoos, farming and sport.

More information: Wanderlust

Chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans have been living for hundreds of thousands of years in their forest, living fantastic lives, 

never overpopulating, never destroying the forest.

I would say that they have been in a way more successful 

than us as far as being in harmony with the environment. 

Jane Goodall