Watching Chimps for the First Time

March 17, 2007

Jane Goodall's In the Shadow of Man was published in 1971, and it contains an account of her experiences observing the chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in Tanzania. In this early book she employs an eyes-wide-open prose style that is both descriptive and excitable. She is perfectly willing to turn from chimpanzees to narrative animal encounters such as this:

One evening when I was wading in the shallows of the lake to pass a rocky outcrop, I suddenly stopped dead as I saw the sinuous black body of a snake in the water. It was all of six feet long, and from the slight hood and the dark stripes at the back of the neck I knew it to be a Storm's water cobra—a deadly reptile for the bite of which there was, at that time, no serum. As I stared at it an incoming wave gently deposited part of its body on one of my feet... [44]

Could this be the end of Jane? Get the book and read on.

The picture I am getting of Goodall is of a young woman immersing herself single-mindedly in another world.. the world of the chimpanzees. She describes herself thus after 18 months of constant work in the mountain reserve:

My alarm clock was always set for five-thirty in the morning, and after a slice of bread and a cup of coffee I would hurry up after my chimps. I never felt the need for food, and seldom for water, when I was roaming the forests... And then, after returning to camp as darkness fell, always there were notes to transcribe... [62]

Her goal through this time was simply to get close enough to the chimps to intimately observe their world.

Goodall documented the use of tools on the part of chimpanzees, noting early on the way a chimp would use a grass stem to draw out tasty termites from a mound. This simple observation brought about a closer look at the nature of a human being.. who could no longer be defined as the only "toolmaker". It seems like such a simple observation.. but it would be repeated often as an example of advanced primate behavior.

I find it odd how something so important can result from such a simple project: observation. Could it really be that chimpanzees had been present all these thousands of years but nobody really knew much about the way they behaved in the wild? Nobody had bothered to figure out how these creatures live? It was all just hearsay. Just a few weeks ago there was even the shocking story of chimps who had used sharp spears in a hunt. These were chimpanzees in Senegal (a long way from the Gombe in East Africa.. but it demonstrates the continuing importance of observation. In fact, it makes you wonder how much more is sitting out there waiting for someone just to bother to take notice.. It could almost be a parable for life: the really important thing is just to observe the world. That is what 99% of the population is trying very hard not to do.. shocking but true.

[For a glimpse of this world of observation look at the Google Earth-based blog for the Jane Goodall Institute. This is a beautiful example of how well place can be documented by the tools available on the internet.]