Behaviour And Beyond
Very Interesting|May/June 2019

In 1960, Jane Goodall travelled to Africa with the aim of integrating herself into a community of wild chimps. Now nearly 60 years on, with Goodall having been put forward for a Nobel Peace Prize, her observations have transformed the way we see our primate cousins.

Sarah Begum
Behaviour And Beyond

How did your journey begin?

I was born loving animals. I had a supportive mother – she found books for me to read about animals, thinking that I’d learn to read more quickly. I read Tarzan when I was 10, and that’s when my dream began: to go to Africa, live with wild animals and write books about them. I never thought about being a scientist, because there weren’t women scientists doing those things in those days. It was wartime, we had little money and my father was off fighting, so Africa was a long way away.

I hadn’t been to college – I couldn’t afford it. We had just enough money for a secretarial course, so I got a job in London as a secretary. When I was 23, I was invited to visit a school friend in Kenya, so I gave that job up, moved back home and worked as a waitress in Bournemouth to save money for the sea voyage. It was in Kenya that I met the palaeoanthropologist Dr Louis Leakey. Somebody suggested I see him if I was interested in animals. Guess what? He needed a secretary.

So that boring old course led me to a job with him. He was interested in knowing the similarities between early humans and chimps, and he eventually decided that I was the person he’d been looking for, for 10 years, to go to Tanzania to study chimps.

What do you think has been your greatest discovery relating to chimpanzees?

It’s hard to say. I mean, the discovery that led to press coverage in National Geographic magazine was chimpanzees using and making tools at the Gombe National Park in Tanzania. The chimps used grass stems to fish for termites, and leafy twigs where they removed the leaves to turn it into a tool. This was in 1960, and at that time, it was thought that only humans used and made tools.

What’s your favourite memory of your time spent with chimpanzees?

This story is from the May/June 2019 edition of Very Interesting.

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This story is from the May/June 2019 edition of Very Interesting.

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