![]() ![]() And a sense of persistence exudes from her descriptions: "For three hours I watched the chimps feeding" "I was not only weary but soaking wet from crawling through dense undergrowth". It took six months before she was able to get nearer than 500 yards to any chimpanzee. Leakey's choice of a patient and persistent researcher was wise. She would leave at dawn with nothing but a kettle for coffee to sustain her through the day. (The simplicity persists - she celebrated her CBE, of which she is proud, with a sandwich.) Goodall jumped at Leakey's idea and soon she, and her amazingly supportive mother, were living in a tent by the lake. Her simple way of living, which included eating only once a day, was essential for studying chimpanzees. "He realised that I didn't care about clothes, hairdressing and parties," she says, perched on the edge of her deckchair. Why did Leakey choose this woman, in her mid-twenties, with no degree (she couldn't afford it), to fulfil his amibitious plan of sending someone to observe the wild chimpanzees on the shores of Lake Tanganyika? Because, as well as being a keen observer, she was simple in habits, patient, degree-less, independent of mind, and female. There she found a job as assistant secretary for Louis Leakey, the famous palaeontologist, who was curator at the National Museum of natural history in Nairobi and who became her mentor. It did not converge at the start, when she left her Bournemouth home, with an A level in biology and a dream she had had since eight, inspired by Dr Doolittle, of living in Africa and writing about wild animals. She single-mindedly followed her goal of studying chimpanzees, a route which sometimes converged with traditional academia but often did not. This was anathema to a keen and patient observer of primate behaviour who seems always to have had an emotional independence from the world of universities and scientific laboratories. When she first came across academic zoology it was full of scientists who, she says, "chopped animals up to see how they worked". She taught me that you couldn't add the data on a lot of animals together in a simple way."īut she was not always accepted in academe. Eminent biologist Robert Hinde, master of St John's College, Oxford, says of the woman who is 11 years his junior and whom he once supervised: "She changed the way I worked. She opened our eyes to the complexity of chimpanzee society, with its variety of personalities, its mass of human-like relationships. The CBE, and other accolades such as the National Geographic Society's Hubbard medal, its highest award, mark the admiration with which Goodall is regarded by the establishment. She soon kicks her shoes off, saying they are uncomfortable. She is wearing - unusually, one assumes - a smart dress, suitable garb for receiving a CBE. A delicate figure with an open face and very dark eyes, at 62 she is growing old gracefully. Now she sits in a deckchair, in the sunny gardens of London's Royal Overseas League. She watched from up in trees, down in bushes and perched on mountain tops overlooking the reserve. It was the second of a series of dramatic discoveries she made over decades, by watching and watching, deep in the forests of the Gombe chimpanzee reserve in Tanzania. Jane Goodall's discovery that chimpanzees make and use tools distorted the line drawn by humans to separate themselves from other animals. Quickly Evered sucked the liquid from his homemade sponge. As he withdrew them we saw the gleam of water. He picked a handful of leaves, chewed them for a moment, took them out of his mouth, and pushed them down into the hollow. The dramatic moment when chimpanzees were first spotted using tools: "Evered, as he climbed through a tree, suddenly stopped and, with his face close to the bark, peered into what looked like a small hollow. ![]() Aisling Irwin talks to Jane Goodall, the first zoologist to credit chimpanzees with personalities. ![]()
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