Present at the Future (28 page)

“It wasn’t exactly genteel,” she said. “I wouldn’t have described it like that. But animals were my passion from even before I could speak, apparently. I was watching earthworms in my bed when I was one and a half. And I hid for five hours in a henhouse when we had the opportunity to go into the country because I was collecting the eggs and there was the egg. Where was the hole big enough for the egg to come out? Nobody told me, so I hid.”

Even at this young age, Goodall would practice a technique that would serve her well the rest of her life: Patiently watching and waiting.

“It was my first wonderful experiment. And then when I was about ten, or eleven, I found the books about Tarzan of the Apes. I fell in love with Tarzan. He’s got that wife Jane, so I was terribly jealous of her. And that was when my dream started. When I grew up, I would go to Africa, live with animals, and write books about them. That’s how it all began.”

Opportunity to fulfill that dream came knocking in the form of an invitation by a friend to stay on a farm in Kenya. “I was working at the time with a documentary film studio in London, which is a great job, didn’t pay very much, so I quit that, went home, and worked as a waitress and served people their breakfast, tea, and lunch and dinner till I’d saved up enough money to buy my return
fare by boat, because it was cheapest in those days. I was twenty-three and I sort of said bye-bye to family, friends, and country, and off I went on this amazing adventure.”

LOUIS LEAKEY

Jane stayed for just a month, not wanting to “sponge off people.” Looking to stay in Africa, she found a “boring” job as a secretary that, if nothing else, kept her in earshot of the great explorer of the day: Louis Leakey.

“Somebody said, ‘Jane, if you’re interested in animals, you must meet Louis.’ So I picked up the telephone, cheeky me, and made an appointment to go and see Louis Leakey. He was then curator of the Natural History Museum in Nairobi.

“He was amazing. The first time when I called, to my amazement, he answered the phone, and he said, ‘I’m Leakey. What do you want?’ It wasn’t a very auspicious beginning. But then when I got there, he took me all around. He asked me so many questions about the animals there, and because I had done what my mother said I should do, which was, if you really want something, you work hard, you take advantage of opportunity, and you never give up.”

Leakey was impressed with her knowledge. She had been doing a lot of homework learning about Africa and its wildlife, spending many lunch hours in the Natural History Museum. “So he gave me the opportunity to work for him, and he took me with his wife [Mary] and one other young English girl to the now-famous Olduvai Gorge. It was absolutely wild, untouched Africa.

“And typical Louis, there was never any money, so everything was on the shoestring, and the equipment mostly didn’t work, and it was a very ramshackle sort of place. And I remember when he first talked to me about going on that expedition, and he said, ‘Well, it’s going to depend on my wife. If she likes you, you can come.’ And can you imagine what it was like when I went to lunch at the house, thinking, Oh, Dear, what can I do to make Mary like me?”

Fortunately, she did. Goodall went to work with the Leakeys before they made their famous discovery of the “Zinj” bones in Olduvai Gorge that would change views about the origins of humans in Africa. In fact, she began work in Africa when archaeology was not the exact, rigid science it is today, where excavations are crisscrossed with a grid work of strings carefully marking the exact place objects are removed from the Earth.

“There was no formal digging up a place and marking it on a grid. It was pre-all that, so we just spent all day chipping away in the rock. There wasn’t a road there. There wasn’t a trail. There was nothing. And all the animals were there, the antelopes, the zebra, the giraffes, and then one evening, there was a rhino, which was a little bit scary, and one evening a young male lion, two years old, totally curious, never seen anything like me.”

Goodall had found her calling. She was hooked on a new career.

“When I got there, when I got out to Olduvai, it was like being at home. Louis realized that I was the sort of person he said he’d been looking for about ten years, who didn’t care about hairdressing and clothes and parties and boyfriends. You know, I really wanted to be in the wild.

“So he made the suggestion to me. It took him a year to get the money. I mean, who was going to give money to a young girl, a female, who didn’t have a degree of any sort, straight out from England? What a ridiculous idea. So I was in England waiting, learning what I could about chimpanzees, while he searched for money and eventually found a wealthy American businessman who said, ‘Okay, Louis, here you are. Here’s enough money for six months. We’ll see how she does.’”

And she did quite well.

“It was a very, very worrying time because I got to Gombe, again I felt I was at home, but the chimpanzees ran away as soon as they saw me. You know, they’re very conservative. They’d not seen a white ape
before. And I knew if that six months’ money ran out before I’d seen something really exciting, I would have let Louis down. ‘Well, we told you so. This is ridiculous.’ But fortunately, just before that time came, I saw the first observations of using and making tools, and that was the saving observation, the breakthrough, and he was able to go to the National Geographic Society and persuade them to put some more money in when the first six months ran out. Because, of course, at that time we were defined as man, the toolmaker. That was supposed to differentiate us more than anything else in the rest of the animal kingdom.”

Jane’s discovery of the toolmaking ability of the chimps would make her famous.

“David Greybeard [the chimpanzee], bless his heart, I saw him crouched over a termite mound, couldn’t really see properly. They were still not very relaxed in my presence. I was hiding. But I knew he was using a piece of grass, and a few days later, he and one of the other chimps—I could see them much better—the whole thing, putting in the grass, picking the termites off, picking a leafy twig, and stripping off the leaves, which was the beginning of toolmaking.

“I couldn’t actually believe it. I had to see it about four times before I let Louis Leakey know. And then I sent a telegram. And he sent back his famous comment, ‘Ha, ha. Now we must redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as humans.’”

How did Goodall know, when she watched the chimp drawing out the ants on a stem, that she was observing a revolutionary act? As Louis Pasteur observed a century before, chance favors the prepared mind. “I knew because just about two weeks before, I was visited by George Schaller, who’d just finished his mountain gorilla study, and as we sat up on the peak, which was my lookout place from which gradually the chimps got used to me, he said, ‘If you see tool using and hunting, those two things will make your study worthwhile,’ and within two weeks, I saw them both. It was quite extraordinary. And both times it was David Greybeard.”

She named the chimps she was studying, a unique practice that no one else was following. “No, they weren’t. And the funny thing was, after a bit, Louis said, ‘Jane, you have to get a degree, because otherwise you can’t get your own money, and I won’t always be around to get money for you.’ But he said, ‘We don’t have time to mess about with a BA, so you’ll have to go straight for a PhD.’

“So he managed to persuade Cambridge in England to accept me as a PhD student. And when I got there, it was actually a very unpleasant and hostile reception that I had. I shouldn’t have named the chimps. It wasn’t scientific. I knew nothing.

“I mean, I couldn’t talk about their personalities, these vivid personalities that I by then was beginning to know. I certainly couldn’t talk about them being capable of rational thought, which they clearly were. And finally, worst sin of all was that I was ascribing to them emotions, like happiness, sadness, and so forth. But more importantly perhaps, all through my childhood, I had this wonderful teacher, and that was my dog Rusty. So I knew that animals had personalities, minds, and feelings, and of course they needed names. But fortunately by that time I was twenty-seven and I wasn’t in it because I wanted a PhD. I was there for Louis.”

Besides being ridiculed at Cambridge, Goodall found that her scientific methods and integrity were challenged. “I was even accused of teaching the chimps how to fish for termites, which would have been such a brilliant coup.

“So, the Geographic came in and provided money, and then my late ex-husband was sent out by Geographic, and he got this amazing film, some of which has been blown up for the IMAX, and it’s just amazing that the film he took in 1961 has been blown up onto this huge screen. Actually, it’s very moving for me to see that. I feel I’m back.”

My own earliest memories of Leakey and Goodall were shaped by what I watched on television in the 1950s and 1960s, the National Geographic specials. Goodall believes that to be true for many people.
“Whole generations of people saw and were moved by those and got fascinated. And, you know, literally thousands of people have said, ‘I’m doing what I do because I grew up with you.’”

David Greybeard, the toolmaking chimp, died from pneumonia in 1958 at the age of around 35, not very old for a chimp. Thinking back to the patience and empathy she showed her chimps, I wondered aloud whether she thought that a primatologist’s sex influences how they conduct their work.

“I think, in many cases, it actually does. Louis Leakey always thought women were better as observers. He felt that they were more patient, and certainly it’s very often true that women tend to be a bit quieter and more prepared to sit there and let the animal—whatever animal is being studied—tell you things. And it’s getting more difficult today because students go out and they have a hypothesis and they’ve got to prove or disprove it. But in the days when I went out, nobody knew anything, so you just went out there, and everything was new and everything was exciting. It was a tremendous privilege really to be there then.

“And I think that women have a couple of things going for them through evolution. Good mothers had to be patient; otherwise they didn’t raise a sufficient number of kids. So if patience can be innate, then the female is likely to have a larger portion of it. And secondly, women have had to be able to very quickly understand the wants and needs of nonverbal beings. That’s their own kids. So that too might be helpful when you’re trying to learn about another species. And finally, women have traditionally played a role of just being in the family and watching very carefully to see what the relationships are so that [they] can prevent discord within a family before it actually happens.”

But can’t males share these traits as well?

“Of course males can have them, and there are some absolutely amazing male field study–men doing wonderful field studies. It’s just that women seem to be a little more gentle about it.”

Scientists like to be surprised. That’s why they are in the business they are—to discover the unknown. Goodall was certainly surprised to learn of the toolmaking abilities of our nearest cousins. But an even greater surprise awaited her years later.

“The most surprising and shocking really was when, in 1970—that’s after ten years of research—we realized that chimpanzees have a dark side, just like us. I thought they were so like us, but rather nicer. And then to find that they are capable of brutality, that they may even have a series of events not unlike primitive warfare, that they can attack members of another social group so severely that those individuals die as a result of their wounds, and that infants can be killed. And that was very, very shocking.”

Why did it take 10 years to discover that?

“Because the boundary patrols are right out at the far end of their range, and I suppose we just weren’t following them far enough. But also the war—we called it the four-year war—was a rather specific circumstance. Our main study community divided and the smaller half took up a portion of the range, which they had previously all shared. And when those two groups had separated, the males of the larger group began to systematically annihilate the split-off individuals. It was almost like a civil war. And it was very, very shocking.”

It almost sounds like it was a preplanned, well-thought-out tactic. “Certainly, when they’re moving out to the peripheral part of their range, it seems to be planned. Like, one or two males will set off and they’ll look back, and very soon, the entire group knows exactly what’s happening at that point. The females and young ones usually stop, and they don’t go on with the big males.”

Goodall gave up real field research in the late 1980s and since then has been in the forefront of animal rights work.

“I was very shocked at a conference in Chicago to see secretly filmed footage of chimpanzees in a medical research lab in cages that
were five foot by five foot and totally bleak and barren, isolated, these highly social beings who are so like us in so many ways. And that was really what took me out as an advocate, took me away from pure research, because I felt I owed it to the chimps. They’d taught me so much, they’d given me so much. They really helped to blur the line that people saw as so sharp dividing us from the rest of the animal kingdom. And once that line is seen as blurred, once you’re prepared to admit that we’re not the only beings with personalities, minds, and feelings, then you have a new respect not only for the chimps, the other great apes, but [also for] other amazing sentient, sapient beings with whom we share the planet.”

After decades of watching animals in the wild showing more intelligence than we give them credit for, Goodall has strong feelings about animals used in research. “It was very unfortunate that there was this feeling that it’s fine to do anything to an animal, as long as maybe it’s for human good instead of saying, as most scientists will, ‘Unfortunately, we’ll always need some animals.’ We’ve already got alternatives to those. And so I want a mind-set that says it’s not really ethical to do this to animals, so let’s get together as soon as we can and find ways to do it without using animals. Because, you know, our brains are so amazing. We can do so much.”