Ape Culture and Conservation
Primatology emerged as a field of study in the early 1960's. Perhaps the best-known primatologist is Jane Goodall, a British chimpanzee researcher whose pioneering work opened the door to the in-depth study of great apes in the wild. In 1960, Goodall traveled to Africa and landed a job as assistant to famed fossil hunter Louis Leakey. The following year, Leakey sent her to Gombe, a forest along the Tanzanian shore of Lake Tanganyika that was home to a population of wild chimpanzees. At the time, scientists knew little about the lives of chimpanzees, and Leakey wondered whether scientists could learn something about the behavior of ancient human ancestors by studying modern living apes in the wild. Goodall spent months patiently working to make the chimpanzees comfortable in her presence. She would clear a patch of forest and lay out bananas to attract them. Then she would sit quietly near them. Eventually, the chimpanzees neither fled from her nor expected handouts of food, and Goodall could follow and observe them for hours.
By the mid-to-late 1960's, Goodall's discoveries about chimpanzee behavior had blurred the lines that, scientists thought, separated people from all other animals. She described the long and intense bond between chimpanzee mothers, their babies, and other relatives. She became the first to discover that chimpanzees fashion simple tools from sticks and blades of grass. Most amazing of all, she watched chimpanzees hunt and kill monkeys, antelope, and other animals, and share the meat. This discovery particularly shocked the public and the scientific world, which had long thought of all apes as vegetarians (nonmeat-eaters), chiefly because scientists had not witnessed chimpanzees killing other animals.
Goodall also documented that chimpanzee society values intelligence as much as it does physical strength. Members of a community remember the debts and favors they owe to other group members, as well as those owed to them. For example, if Frodo gives meat to Freud after a hunt, Freud will remember the favor and later repay Frodo by giving him meat from another hunt.
In the 1960's, Louis Leakey also sent other students off to study gorillas and orangutans. Dian Fossey, an American woman, became the pioneering researcher for gorillas. She conducted her research in the Virunga Volcanoes region of east-central Africa. There she documented the gentle nature of these giant apes, which, at that time, had a reputation for ferocity and aggression. She also opened the public's eyes to the threats to gorillas from poaching and loss of habitat.
In the early 1970's, Biruté Galdikas, a student from the University of California at Los Angeles, traveled to the rain forests of Indonesia and undertook the first long-term study of orangutans in the wild. She became the first scientist to document the unusual solitary nature of these apes and the often-violent relationships among males of the species.
Bonobos, which were unknown to scientists until the 1920's, were not studied in the wild until the 1980's, when Japanese primatologist Takayoshi Kano from Kyoto University established a research station in central Africa. Before Kano began studying bonobos, they were known mainly from studies carried out in zoos, where they appeared to be completely nonviolent. In the wild, however, female bonobos have less power, and males are more aggressive. Occasionally they even hunt and eat meat. Today, despite the work of Kano and others, the inaccessibility of the bonobos' habitat and the many political troubles in that part of the world have seriously interfered with primatologists' efforts to learn more about these fascinating apes.
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