If you, for example, see chimpanzees fetching ticks and other insects from each other’s hairy backs, a behaviour called ‘social grooming’, their goal is not mere hygiene. The chimps of the Gombe jungle organised themselves in warfare, in support and alliances, thus displaying highly complex social behaviour. She saw the chimps acting socially, with maternal care, sometimes even politically. What Jane observed stood in complete contrast to that image. “Think King Kong,” Van der Berg explains. But Jane had no experience in the sciences, so she did not know about this, and she did it anyway.Īccording to Van der Berg, the dominant image of apes and monkeys at the time when Jane penned her first observations, was of wildness and aggression. In the scientific world of the era this was unprecedented, even “not-done”. “Once you have been close to chimps for a while they are as easy to tell apart as your classmates,” Jane wrote in her book.īecause the chimps were individuals, it made sense for Jane to start giving them names. For one, she started to recognise them as individuals, with individual traits and characters. “She was able to observe them for a long time in their natural habitat.”įrom her unique position, Goodall saw the chimpanzees differently than most scientists at the time.
“Jane was the first person in the world to eventually gain the trust of the animals living in the area,” Lisette van den Berg, behavioural biologist of primates (UU) and long-time fan of Jane, explains.
She wrote down her experiences in the book My Life with the Chimpanzees. For the first time, we saw chimps for what (or who) they really are. As a young primatologist she travelled to the deep jungle of Tanzania, where she pioneered new ways of studying human’s closest living relative, the chimpanzee. For a long time, chimpanzees were simply misunderstood.
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