Although animals had been seen using objects as tools in the past, it was the first instance of an animal being observed altering an object for a practical purpose -in other words, toolmaking, an activity previously thought to be the defining characteristic of human beings. The encampment on Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania, where Jane Goodall began her study of the wild chimpanzees.Įarly in her stay at Gombe, Goodall observed David Graybeard and the band’s leader, Goliath, stripping the leaves from sticks to use them for collecting and eating termites. Readers of her books have come to know many of the Gombe chimpanzees by name, including the high-ranking female known as Flo, her daughter Fifi, and Fifi’s ferocious son, Frodo. In fact, she found the chimps in her study group to have widely divergent personalities and complex family relationships. It was believed that the numbering system prevented researchers from investing the animals with human emotions, but Goodall believed that understanding animal behavior requires the observer to see animals as individuals, rather than interchangeable specimens. Her habit of giving the chimps human names was a sharp departure from established practice, which dictated that animals be given numbers, not names. For months after, Jane told him firmly that she’d never return his feelings, Leakey still sent her love letters.” (Melville B. Jane wrote to others that she was horrified by the overture from Leakey, who was thirty years her senior and married.
And within months of their first meeting, Leakey told Jane he was in love with her. Leakey arranged for her to study primates while he raised funds so she could conduct chimpanzee research in Tanzania. Leakey hired Jane on the spot to do secretarial work and saw in her the makings of a scientist. In Nairobi, Kenya, Goodall “boldly asked for an appointment with Louis Leakey, whose interest in great apes grew from his pioneering research into human origins. Louis Leakey (1903-1972), the pioneering paleoanthropologist who mentored a generation of scientists in East Africa, including primate researcher Jane Goodall. Over the months that followed, she gradually won the trust of a single male chimpanzee she named David Graybeard. At first the Gombe chimps fled at the sight of a human intruder, and Goodall could only observe them from a distance through binoculars. In the summer of 1960, Jane Goodall and her mother arrived at Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in what is now Tanzania. When the British colonial authorities refused to allow her to travel alone to the chimpanzee reserve near Lake Tanganyika, she recruited her mother to stay with her. Despite Leakey’s confidence in her abilities, other experienced professionals did not believe a lone young woman from England could survive in the African bush.
Although Jane lacked scientific training, or even a college degree, she was eager to attempt the research herself. A leading authority on the evolution of man, Leakey knew there was a lack of hard data concerning the behavior of chimpanzees - our nearest evolutionary relatives - in the wild. Leakey hired her as an assistant and secretary, and she accompanied him and his wife Mary on an archeological dig at Olduvai Gorge. In Kenya, Goodall was introduced to the legendary anthropologist Louis Leakey. Young Jane Goodall loved animals, books, and books about animals. When an opportunity arose to visit a friend’s family in Kenya, she returned to Bournemouth and worked as a waitress in a local hotel, living at home to save money for her trip. Unable to afford a university education, she moved to London after school to work as a secretary for a documentary film company. She did well in school despite an unusual neurological condition, known as prosopagnosia, which makes it difficult to recognize faces. A precocious reader in a family of women who encouraged intellectual accomplishment, Jane read everything she could get her hands on about wild animals and Africa. When Mortimer Morris-Goodall went to war, young Jane moved with her mother and younger sister, Judy, to live with her grandmother and aunts in the seaside town of Bournemouth, where they remained when her father and mother divorced following the war. From early childhood, Jane was fascinated by all animals, an interest encouraged by her mother, Vanne. Her father, Mortimer Morris-Goodall, was a well-known race car driver. Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall was born in London. ApGoodall’s father gave her a stuffed toy chimpanzee called Jubilee for her first birthday.
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