Once recovered, the rugged terrain and thick vegetation made traversing the reserve a challenge and often she hiked miles without seeing a chimpanzee. As a high ranking male of the chimpanzee community, his acceptance meant other group members also allowed Jane to observe.
It was David Greybeard whom Jane first witnessed using tools. She spotted the chimpanzee sticking blades of stiff grass into termite holes to extract termites.
Excited, she telegraphed Dr. Leakey about her groundbreaking observation. During the years she studied at Gombe Stream National Park, she made three observations that challenged conventional scientific ideas: 1 chimps are omnivores, not herbivores and even hunt for meat; 2 chimps use tools; and 3 chimps make their tools a trait previously used to define humans.
The book was wildly popular, and her academic peers were outraged. Jane Goodall earned her Ph. Jane shifted from scientist to conservationist and activist after attending a primatology conference in , where she noticed all the presenters mentioned deforestation at their study sites worldwide. Jane herself had noticed some signs of deforestation along Lake Tanganyika at Gombe Stream National Park, but nothing significant.
Then, in the early s, she flew in a small plane over the park and was shocked to see large-scale deforestation on the other side of the park where local villages were rapidly expanding. Miles of bare hills stretched where once untouched forests had stood.
Jane knew that she had to take action to protect the forest and preserve the critical habitat of the chimpanzees. Her first mission was to improve the conditions for chimpanzees held at medical research facilities.
Jane helped set up several refuges for chimps freed from these facilities or those orphaned by the bushmeat trade. She met with anyone she felt could be key to protecting places like Gombe Stream National Park and species such as her beloved chimpanzees and has been an advocate for protecting animals, spreading peace, and living in harmony with the environment.
Jane is still hard at work today raising awareness and money to protect the chimpanzees, their habitats, and the planet we all share. She travels about days a year giving speeches, talking to government officials and business people around the world encouraging them to support wildlife conservation and protect critical habitats.
One of her first discoveries was that chimpanzees are omnivorous, not vegetarian as had been supposed. On several occasions, she observed the chimps hunting and eating small mammals. At the time, the use of tools was thought to be the defining characteristic of human beings.
She has seen ritualized behavior including use of the social embrace to comfort an animal in mourning. Altruism has been shown by the adoption of orphaned chimps by others in the band. She also argues that the chimpanzees show the beginnings of a primitive language system that includes more than sounds with specific meanings. It introduced the public to the serious scientific work being done. She was increasingly alarmed by the changes she was seeing in her beloved Africa.
Possibly larger. But the dung beetles—the males have horns! Every time I see a picture of Jane squatting in the dust next to chimps, I always worry that a dung beetle was seconds away from rolling a manure ball over her foot, or a giant centipede was on the verge of crawling up her shorts. Then there are the diseases. Before my trip, I was required to be vaccinated for cholera, typhoid, smallpox, and yellow fever. None of this prevented me from getting sick; like Jane, I came down with malaria though my case was considerably milder than hers.
My skin became hardened to the rough grasses of the valleys and my blood immune to the poison of the tsetse fly, so that I no longer swelled hugely each time I was bitten. Leakey never should have sent me. Chimpanzees —Pan troglodytes— are our closest evolutionary relatives. We share about 98 percent of our DNA with them. Genetically, we are more like chimps than mice are like rats. But Jane studied them for the sake of studying them, fascinated with their family and clan relationships.
She let her intuition guide her. For two months, the chimps fled when they heard her coming. Then, one day, a huge male sauntered into camp, climbed a palm tree, and ate a few nuts. A while later, he came into camp and stole a banana off a table. Eventually, he allowed Jane to offer him one. She called him David Greybeard , for his jaunty white goatee. Naming animals was scoffed at among the scientific community as being amateurish and silly.
But David Greybeard signaled to the rest of the community that Jane was not as scary as they had thought. There was Mr. McGregor, a cranky old male. There was the alpha female Flo, and her offspring, Faben, Figan, and Fifi. She observed them kiss, embrace, pat each other on the back, shake their fists at each other. She watched them act pretty dang human. One day, moving quietly through the jungle in search of the chimpanzees, Jane came upon a large termite mound. David Greybeard sat beside it.
She watched as, over and over again, he poked long, sturdy blades of grass into a hole, withdrew them, and plucked off the termites with his lips. She poked one in the hole and withdrew it. A dozen or more termites clung to the stem. A few weeks later, she would watch the chimps make tools , breaking off small leafy twigs from trees and stripping the leaves, before poking them in the termite mound holes.
We called ourselves Man the Toolmaker, and that skill allegedly distinguished us from every other living thing. I find this odd. You would think biologists would have focused on something there was no chance of any other creature ever mastering.
Why were we not Man the Terrible Joke Teller? Already a legend at the age of 27, Jane would go on to make more discoveries. That chimps were not the benign vegetarians we thought them to be, but omnivores, like us. And also somewhat sadly , they were wagers of war. Goodall's stance is that scientists must try harder to find alternatives to the use of animals in research.
She has openly declared her opposition to militant animal rights groups who engage in violent or destructive demonstrations. Extremists on both sides of the issue, she believes, polarize thinking and make constructive dialogue nearly impossible.
While reluctantly resigned to the continuation of animal research, she feels that young scientists must be educated to treat animals more compassionately. Goodall's fieldwork led to the publication of numerous articles and books. In the Shadow of Man , her first major work, appeared in The book, essentially a field study of chimpanzees, effectively bridged the gap between scientific treatise and popular entertainment. Her vivid prose brought the chimps to life, revealing an animal world of social drama, comedy and tragedy, although her tendency to attribute human behaviors and names to chimpanzees struck some critics being as manipulative.
Goodall outlined the moral dilemma of keeping chimpanzees captive in her book, Through a Window : "The more we learn of the true nature of nonhuman animals, especially those with complex brains and corresponding complex social behavior, the more ethical concerns are raised regarding their use in the service of man—whether this be in entertainment, as 'pets,' for food, in research laboratories or any of the other uses to which we subject them," she wrote.
Her work, The Chimpanzee Family Book , written specifically for children, sought to convey a more humane view of wildlife. Many of Goodall's endeavors are conducted under the auspices of the Jane Goodall Institute for Wildlife Research, Education and Conservation, a nonprofit organization that promotes the protection of chimpanzees and strong environmental practices.
Founded in , the organization is based in Virginia but boasts some two dozen offices around the world. The book had not yet hit store shelves when Goodall was accused of plagiarism. According to The Washington Post , the famed scientist borrowed sections from Wikipedia and other sources in her new book without giving them proper credit. The publisher subsequently announced the release of the book would be delayed to address the unattributed sections.
Goodall, through a statement from her institute, apologized for these unintentional mistakes: "This was a long and well researched book, and I am distressed to discover that some of the excellent and valuable sources were not properly cited, and I want to express my sincere apologies," she said.
Seeds of Hope was reissued in The assignment ran longer than anticipated and the couple fell in love; they were married on March 28, , and their European honeymoon marked one of the rare occasions on which Goodall was absent from Gombe Stream. In , she gave birth to a son, Hugo Eric Louis, known as "Grub. After divorcing van Lawick in , Goodall was married to Derek Bryceson , a member of Tanzania's parliament and director of its national parks, until his death from cancer.
In recognition of her achievements, Goodall has received numerous honors and awards, including the Gold Medal of Conservation from the San Diego Zoological Society in , the J.
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