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Goodall’s knowledge of natural
history had impressed Leakey
on their first meeting in 1957 and
he offered her a job studying the
behavior of chimpanzees. As an
anthropologist and paleontologist,
Leakey believed in evolutionary
theory, which proposed that humans
and the great apes—chimpanzees,
bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans—
in the family Hominidae (Great
Apes), share a common ancestor.Making connections
Leakey’s fieldwork focused on
looking for the “missing link”—
fossils of transitional forms
between that common ancestor
and humans. Chimpanzees had not
been studied seriously in the wild
and such a study, he reasoned,
could throw light on the evolution
of early humans. Goodall, a keen
observer and free of academic ties,
was the ideal choice for the work.
As Leakey had hoped, she provided
a fresh perspective on the theory
and was brave enough to say that
chimps and humans were more
alike than had been imagined.Until this point, the scientific and
popular consensus was that the
ability to devise and make tools
marked humans out as superior
to the rest of the animal kingdom.
Goodall’s findings forced scientists
to think again.
Goodall’s camp was in Gombe
Stream National Park, Tanzania,
where she studied a chimp
community on the eastern shore
of Lake Tanganyika. In choosing to
live among chimps to witness theirSee also: Evolution by natural selection 24–31 ■ A system for identifying all nature’s organisms 86–87 ■ Animal ecology
10 6 –113 ■ A n i ma l behav ior 116 –117THE VARIETY OF LIFE
Jane Goodall Born in London in 1934, Jane
Goodall’s first meeting with a
chimp was a stuffed animal that
her father named Jubilee. She was
interested in animal behavior from
an early age—once, she hid in a
henhouse for hours so that
she could watch a chicken lay
an egg. She left school at 18 and
worked in various jobs, before
going to Kenya in 1957 and
meeting paleoanthropologist
Louis Leakey. With his support,
in 1960 Goodall set up a research
base in Gombe, Tanzania, where
she was to study chimpanzees
until 1975. Her work radicallytransformed our understanding
of chimpanzees and challenged
perceived ideas of our own place
in the natural world. In 1965, she
earned a Ph.D. in ethology from
Cambridge University. Her many
awards include France’s Legion
of Honor, given to her in 2006.Key works1969 My Friends the Wild
Chimpanzees
1986 The Chimpanzees of
Gombe: Patterns of Behavior
2009 Hope for Animals and
Their Worldtrue unfettered behavior, Goodall
was one of the first people to work
in the field of ethology, whereby
biologists monitor animals in their
natural environments and try to
understand their natural behaviors.
In her first few months at the ❯❯A chimp uses a twig stripped of its
leaves—a modified “tool”—to catch
termites for consumption. Goodall first
recorded the ability of chimpanzees to
invent simple technologies in Gombe.US_118-125_Using_animal_models_to_understand_human_behaviour.indd 121 12/11/18 6:24 PM