50 Years of Chimpanzees - a conversation with Jane Goodall

[groovedaddy]

Q. In July you celebrated the 50th anniversary of your first trip to Gombe Stream Reserve. When you arrived there in 1960, could you have imagined the life that lay ahead?

A. Of course not. I was a young girl, straight from England, more or less, no degree of any sort, and Louis Leakey was giving me this amazing opportunity to live with the animal most like us.

There’d been no long-term studies of great apes. The longest had been George Schaller, with mountain gorillas, and he’d stayed a year. I think Louis Leakey thought the study might last 10 years. But at 26, I thought perhaps three. And then the more I learned about chimpanzees, the more I realized there was more to learn — until I couldn’t stop.

Q. So you got to Gombe, and very soon, you observed something astounding: Chimpanzees used tools to fish for ants.

A. I went in July. And tool-making was toward the end of October.

Q. After you had lived with the wild chimpanzees for a year, Dr. Leakey sent you to Cambridge for a doctorate. How did the conservative professors there respond to you?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/science/16conversation.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a210

[montanto]

1. cool article. thanks for posting.

[azurnoir]

2. Thanks I have to go and dig out one of most treasurd finds

a 1962 edition of National Geographic that has one of what I believe is Ms Goodall's first published for the general public works as it's cover story