Skyways – August 2019

54

Is there anything that, with hindsight, you would have done

differently?

I made mistakes, but I learned from them. Today, we

wouldn’t feed the chimps bananas – we try not to interact

with them directly because diseases can transfer. Back then,

nobody had done this before. I think I was rather like an

anthropologist, meeting an uncontacted tribe, giving them

gifts. The bananas got the chimps close, and if the chimps

hadn’t come close, National Geographic wouldn’t have sent

a photographer, the behaviour wouldn’t have been filmed,

and the study would have ended. It would be a mistake

today, but I don’t believe it was a mistake then.

Do you think your time with chimpanzees has shaped how you

view humans, too?

In airports, I’m watching the different ways mothers

cope with fractious children, the way young men and

women behave when they’re about to separate or

when they reunite. I watch people becoming angry and

shouting because their plane is delayed, even though

the people they are shouting at can’t help it. I’m just

watching how people behave in different situations as

though they’re chimps.

Do you think that we’re still evolving?

I don’t think we’re evolving. I think technology is evolving

and changing people. It’s not the kind of evolution that has

brought us to be what we’ve become. Little kids of three

are given video games; children on a bus text each other,

rather than speak. They’re not interacting with nature at all.

This is a tragedy because there’s proof that children need

contact with nature for good psychological development.

What if this continues?

I don’t know, I don’t want to think. My Roots & Shoots

programme is trying to get children back out into nature,

or bringing nature into the classrooms, encouraging

curiosity and hands-on exploration rather than doing

everything virtually. Wherever I go, I see little bits of

nature, little bits of animal behaviour. And nobody else is

watching because they spend nearly all their day on some

kind of technology – they’re missing out on an awful lot

of enjoyment and fun.

As a woman in science, did you encounter any barriers?

I did, but I don’t think it had anything to do with being a

woman. I went to Cambridge to do my PhD in 1961, but I

had no undergraduate degree, so my professors were a bit

nervous. They told me I had done everything wrong in my

field research: I shouldn’t have given the chimps names,

they should have had numbers. I couldn’t talk about their

personalities, their minds or their emotions because those

things were unique to us. In my first scientific paper, every

time I put ‘he’ or ‘she’, the editor crossed it out and put ‘its’

and ‘which’.

I was furious, so I put them back in. You can’t deny

that chimps have sexual differences. I had a wonderful

supervisor, Robert Hinde, who was very critical, but then

he came to Gombe and he could no longer dispute what

I said.

Do you think young female researchers today face barriers?

Women can do many things now that were frowned upon

back then. When I was 16, 17, 18, my friends at school

were planning to become a secretary, air hostess, nurse or

missionary’s wife. I was lucky because Louis Leakey felt

that women were better in the field. He believed we were

more observant – that, evolutionarily speaking, women

need to be good mothers, and to be a good mother, you

need to be patient. He was right, but he also wanted

In 1965, National

Geographic produced

its first film, Miss

Goodall and The

Wild Chimpanzees,

which followed Jane

and her research.