The woman who spent her life living with chimpanzees: Who is Jane Goodall?

In her spare time, she studied birds and other animals, wrote about them, and made drawings. Tarzan and Dr. Dolittle were her favorite books, and she knew she could be a better friend to Tarzan than any other Jane. The African wilderness in the 1930s and 1940s was no place for a little girl; But her mother, Vanne, always encouraged her to achieve whatever she set her mind to.

While Jane was working as an assistant at a film studio, she received a letter from her friend Clo inviting her to Kenya. This was a golden opportunity for 22-year-old Jane and she returned home to Bournemouth without wasting any time. In this way, She could work as a waiter and earn money and go to Africa with the money she saved.

In 1957 she finally set sail and arrived at the port of Mombasa on 2 April. Within weeks she met with the famous archaeologist and paleontologist Louis S B Leakey. Impressed by the woman's energy, general knowledge, and interest in animals, Louis hired Jane as his assistant and eventually gave her the task of conducting a study on chimpanzees on a lake in Tanzania. Although there was very little information about chimpanzees at that time, Louis believed that what was learned about them would also shed light on the evolutionary history of humans.

Dame Jane Morris Goodall (3 April 1934), formerly Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall, is an English primatologist and anthropologist. She is considered the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees, after 60 years studying the social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees. Goodall first went to Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania to observe its chimpanzees in 1960.

In 1960, Jane landed on the Gombe beach. Her mother also went with her because it was a time when Tanzania was a British colony and the British authorities did not want a young woman to live in the forest alone.

Jane's first week in Gombe was disappointing. The chimpanzees were very shy and ran away whenever they saw Jane. Just as she was starting to lose her enthusiasm, one day a good idea came to her mind: She climbed up a hill and started watching the chimpanzees with her binoculars. Chimpanzees were thought to be vegetarians, But that day Jane witnessed a very interesting event. She saw a chimpanzee she named David Greybeard eating a bush pig and sharing his food with a female. That wasn't the end, she saw them hunting monkeys and other small mammals many more times later. Jane, who observed chimpanzees eating meat for the first time, would witness much more interesting events in the next two weeks. She noticed that David the chimpanzee was using a stick to dislodge termites from their nests. She watched with bated breath as they plucked the leaves from the branches to make these useful stick tools. David and its friends could literally make and use tools!

Until then, anthropologists had described tool-making as a human trait.

The distinction between man and ape is indeed blurry; That's why Leakey was so excited. He found funding for Jane's future studies and arranged for her to take a PhD at Cambridge University, even though she had no previous degree.

Jane worked hard to increase her knowledge and recorded her observations. Although her views did not always agree with those of her fellow ethologists (animal behavioral scientists), her professors encouraged her and found resources to conduct long-term research at Gombe. More importantly, her professors supported her about the validity of the work she was doing in Gombe.

Jane began traveling back and forth to Gombe and began to gain a more precise and clear perception of chimpanzees. She discovered that, unlike many primates, chimpanzees do not travel in groups. Females and their offspring constituted the simplest members of the chimpanzee community. Males were fighting each other for status and females, and Jane began calling the male member who could dominate others the alpha male.

Jane's observations began to be published in National Geographic, along with striking photographs. Hugo van Lawick, who took these photographs, would later become Jane's husband. As support for the Gombe work grew, Jane and Hugo were able to establish a more permanent camp and recruit more people. Thus, the foundations of the Gombe Research Center were laid.

Studies continuing in 1970 revealed the "dark side" of chimpanzees. When Jane first went to Gombe, she thought chimpanzees were gentler animals than humans. But over time, she realized that they could actually become as wild as us. After a group of male chimpanzees from the Kasakele region migrated to the Kahama region, conflicts began to arise between the two groups. Their strategy was simple: brutally attack your enemy and leave it to die from its wounds! Within 4 years, all the Kahama males and at least one female were eliminated by the other group. You can get more information about this interesting event, known as the 4 Years' War or the Gombe Chimpanzee War, from our article here.

The interesting thing was that such discussions also occurred among individuals belonging to the same group. Over a 3-year period, a female chimpanzee and her female cub killed and ate around 10 other cubs.

Despite all this, Jane also found that chimpanzees have the capacity for altruism. For example; Two cubs, Mel and Darbee, who had lost their mother, were adopted by two unrelated male chimpanzees. These male chimpanzees named Spindle and Beethoven also lost their mothers in the same way. In addition to protecting the cubs, Spindle also shared his own nest with the cubs.

Over the years, the Gombe Research Center (GSRC) grew, and Jane and the researchers she worked with continued to study chimpanzee behavior, ecology, offspring development, and other primate species. Although Jane traveled constantly to promote nature conservation efforts, she also continued to spend time in Gombe. But her main purpose was to compile and write down 25 years of Gombe research.

Thereupon, the book Gombe's Chimpanzees was published in 1986. The publication of the book was introduced at the Understanding Chimpanzees conference in Chicago. With this conference, many biologists working on chimpanzees came together and shared their work with each other. So they realized that there were many threats to chimpanzees that needed to be dealt with urgently. Jane went to the conference as a "scientist" and left as an "activist" whose goal was to protect these amazing animals.

In her later work, Jane made important discoveries about chimpanzees. She came up with a new feeding method she called “Banana Club”. Thanks to this method, she could gain the trust of the chimpanzees, so she could get closer to them and make observations more easily. She found that chimpanzees have a complex social system, regularly perform movements, and have a language consisting of more than 20 sounds. Jane was the first to record observations of these animals eating meat and using tools.