In the summer of 1960, a young English woman stood on the shores of Lake Tanganyika looking into the hills of Gombe Stream Reserve with her mother. From the shore, Gombe seems impossible to negotiate: Steep, tree-covered ridges and their corresponding ravines rise from the beach as if a giant child had reached down with spread fingers and scraped the landscape upward. The pant-hoot calls of chimpanzees--husky puffs of noise that rise quickly into wild screams--echo across the ravines and taunt any visitor to follow the apes across the undulating terrain.
The young woman spent the first months trying to catch up with her subjects, scrambling up cliffs, grabbing onto roots, and then standing perfectly still so as not to scare them away. The only way the chimps would tolerate her presence, she eventually found, was if she lured them close with bananas. Thus began a decades-long effort to follow around groups of chimpanzees to figure out what they can tell us about ourselves.
Her name, of course, was Jane Goodall, and in the years that followed she would become an icon of both sober science and exotic adventure. The willowy figure dressed in green fatigues, the limp blonde hair drawn back in a ponytail, the quiet British voice narrating innumerable National Geographic specials—these images and sounds are inextricably bound to the public’s understanding of chimp behavior. Before Goodall’s work, chimpanzees were known mostly from studies on animals that had been captured and imported to indoor and outdoor laboratories. Although psychobiologists like Robert Yerkes knew that chimps were smart, no one was sure how they used those smarts in the wild.
“When I went to Gombe, nothing was known,” Goodall said recently, “Chimps weren’t allowed to have personalities—no names, no reasoning ability, no emotions. Until one recognized the individuals, you couldn’t work out the social structure, nor could you make any sense of the communication. It was so confusing.” Goodall’s work changed all that. Her detailed daily records of individual chimpanzees—maintained these days by other primatologists and field assistants—resulted in the first chimp personality portraits, as well as startling discoveries of chimpanzee tool use, hunting practices, and even murder.
That was just the beginning. For the past four decades, an army of researchers from Europe, Japan, and the United States has observed chimpanzees at more than 40 sites. In 1966 Toshisada Nishida began a study in the Mahale Mountains, 90 miles south of Gombe, and went on to identify the basic social structure of chimpanzee communities. In the 1970s, researchers discovered that chimps living in Guinea and Ivory Coast, on the far western edge of their species’s range, hunted and used tools differently from their eastern cousins. A decade later, Richard Wrangham, working in both Gombe and the Kibale National Park in Uganda, showed that chimps can act much the same even when they live in different habitats and have different diets. Takayoshi Kano and others, meanwhile, have cast a new light on chimpanzee behavior through studies of the bonobo, the chimpanzee’s more peaceable, more egalitarian cousin.
