The world’s leading expert on chimpanzee behaviour, Dr Jane Goodall, began her revolutionary research in Tanzania 60 years ago. She traveled to Africa to study chimpanzees despite at the time having no experience or qualifications in the subject.
In the 60 years since Goodall first set foot in Africa, the chimps have faced many challenges to their survival. And they are not immune to the latest world crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic.
“As their habitat is invaded more and more by humans, they are susceptible to our contagious diseases. And we’re terrified that COVID- 19 will attack the wild chimpanzee communities around Africa. We have chimps in sanctuaries, ones whose mothers were shot, mostly for bush meat, or rescued from the trafficking. We can protect them. We can close the sanctuary to visitors, we can have the staff quarantined and the food sterilized, all that sort of thing. But in the wild, what can you do?” Goodall says.
Jane’s pioneering research would revolutionise scientific understanding of the primates and even of human beings.
“So the first real milestone, once I got the chimps to trust me, they kept running away to begin with, was seeing the one I named David Graybeard, the first one who stopped running, seeing him using and making tools to fish for termites, because up until that time, Western science thought humans and only humans used and made tools. You know, if they’d bothered to go and talk to some of the people living in the forest, they could have known,” she says.
Being a woman in a then male-dominated field was a double-edged sword. In Africa, it was a help. At Cambridge University, where she studied for a PhD, she had to cope with prejudice.
“When I got to Africa, you know, it was just towards the end of the British colonial rule in Tanzania and the men were understandably sort of, you know, a little bit angry with white men, but a white girl…I was just this defenseless, quiet, just wanting to go in a strange way into the forest. They helped me. And I think being a woman actually benefited,” Goodall recalls.
“And then, of course, when I got to Cambridge, then there was the male-female thing and there were people saying well, I only was doing what I did because I had nice legs and I was the geographic cover girl and stuff.”
Goodall’s research across the decades has shed light on numerous facets of chimp life. For example, we now know they have individual personalities and feel emotions. We also know that different groups of chimps have their own distinct cultures – they hunt prey in different ways, some build nests while others live in caves. And much more is known about the bond between mother and child. The similarities with humans are remarkable.
“We now know that there are good mothers and less good mothers in chimp society and the good mothers of those, well, they have to be affectionate and protective, but not overprotective. But the key thing is supportive. And that’s how I was lucky. My mother supported my mad idea of going to Africa when everybody else laughed at me,” explains Goodall.
The research centre Goodall established in Gombe, Tanzania has been studying wild chimpanzees continuously for 60 years, the longest running programme of its kind.
250 researchers have carried out studies at the Jane Goodall Institute and it has spawned more than 600 different publications on the primates’ behaviour.
The animals are threatened by destruction of their natural habitat, the bush meat trade, animal traffickers and the dangers of traps set by hunters to catch other animals.
While work is being done to protect some areas where chimpanzees live, Goodall is concerned that other communities are being neglected and the chance to find out about those unique cultures could be lost.
“You know, a lot of these things, questions which to me are the most fascinating, how did chimps differ in different environments to how many cultures are there? Well, we’ll not find out because we’re losing the chimps so fast. So they’re losing their cultures with them,” she says.
At the start of the 20th century, there were an estimated 1 million chimpanzees in the world. Now, according to the Jane Goodall Institute, there are fewer than 300,000.
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