Her revolutionary discoveries about chimpanzees are memorably documented
in the NATURE program JANE GOODALL'S WILD CHIMPANZEES. The program gives
viewers a rare look into the chimpanzee's world by chronicling the tense
struggle between two brothers, Freud and Frodo, for leadership of their
troop. It also captures some of the chimp behaviors, from tender hugs
to ruthless killing, that intrigue the scientists who investigate the
origins of our own habits.
The idea that we have much in common with chimps, including more than
98 percent of our genetic code, is now widely accepted. But chimp life
was still a mystery in 1957, when, on a trip she had saved for years to
make, a 23-year old Goodall arrived in Kenya to visit a high school friend.
Once there, in an effort to realize her dream of studying wild animals,
she contacted Louis Leakey, a prominent anthropologist working at a Kenyan
museum who would later become famous for his discoveries of early human
remains at the Olduvai Gorge. She soon won a job assisting Leakey with
his studies, doing everything from documenting monkey behavior to hunting
for fossils. Leakey eventually encouraged Goodall to study chimpanzees,
animals that he believed could provide us a window into our own beginnings.
Many scientists were skeptical, even scandalized, by Leakey's suggestion
that a young woman who had never gone to college could succeed as a
lone field researcher in the chimpanzees' rugged mountain home. Nevertheless,
in 1960, Goodall began her research at Gombe Stream
National Park in the East African nation of Tanzania.
At first, as Goodall recalls in the NATURE program, it appeared that
the primates' behavior would remain forever mysterious. Within a few
years, however, she became intimately familiar with their lives, spending
her days trailing them through the forest and recording their habits.
Some of her techniques were unorthodox and controversial: for instance,
rather than assigning her chimps numbers, she gave them names like "Fifi"
and "Passion." She also set up at Gombe a banana-laden feeding
station designed to lure the apes out into the open, where they could
be more easily observed. She now regrets this practice, which somewhat
altered the chimps' behavior, but researchers have nevertheless found
that Gombe's chimps get less than two percent of their food at the station,
spending the bulk of their time foraging in the forests.
