In July 1960, a 26-year-old secretary from Bournemouth
entered a remote forest in Africa in search of wild chimpanzees.
The whole business of wandering about in Africa,
in the wilds of Africa, was in itself extraordinary
and here was a girl from southern England brought up in, you know,
what did she know about Africa?
And how could she survive?
But within a few months, Jane Goodall was making
discoveries that would help change our entire understanding
of the species closest to us
and challenge the science of what differentiates human from animal.
Nobody had ever done this before, this was unique.
Absolutely extraordinary because she has made everybody
aware of chimpanzees and aware of the closeness between us and chimpanzees.
Where male scientists had floundered, she became accepted
by a group of wild apes
and revealed the unknown world of chimpanzee behaviour.
For many people, Jane has been a major, major inspiration.
You know, I think a lot of young people,
but particularly young women, must have seen
those films and thought, what a wonderful thing to do with your life.
"The soft pressure of his fingers spoke to me,
"not through my intellect,
"but through a more primitive emotional channel.
"The barrier of untold centuries,
"which has grown up during the separate evolution
"of man and chimpanzee was, for those few seconds, broken down.
"It was a reward far beyond my greatest hopes."
Then the notion that, not only was she surviving,
but that she was living alongside these extraordinary animals,
and that they were accepting her, was fabulous.
I mean, in an almost literary sense
that it became a fable of Beauty and the Beast.
Gombe Stream Forest Reserve borders the Eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika
in what is now Tanzania.
Although the reserve had been created to protect
its population of chimpanzees, they had never been studied.
When Jane Goodall arrived in July 1960,
she had enough finances to last six months.
Six months to get close to a shy,
yet potentially violent species of wild animal.
She recorded her experiences in a set of remarkable journals,
which would eventually be crafted into the bestseller
In The Shadow Of Man.
Since dawn I had climbed up and down the steep mountain slopes
and pushed my way through the dense valley forests.
Again and again I had stopped to listen or to gaze through binoculars
at the surrounding countryside.
In two hours, darkness would fall
over the rugged terrain of the Gombe Stream Reserve.
I settled down at my favourite vantage point, the peak,"
hoping that at least I might see a chimpanzee make its nest
for the night before I had to stop work for the day.
The first few weeks it was day after day,
every day, no Saturdays, no Sundays, in fact, after a while
I didn't know when Saturdays and Sundays were.
Up at dawn, down at dusk.
I would sit up on this peak and look out with my binoculars.
I had a little tin trunk and a kettle on a wire and a blanket.
That was it.
For three and a half months, she failed to get closer than 50 yards.
It was a bitter disappointment.
I felt frustration, even despair.
There were times when I wondered
if they would ever permit me to approach them.
Then, early one afternoon,
she encountered the chimpanzee who would change her life.
Nothing happened until 1.30, then I heard a measured tread
and down the hill, straight towards me, came a very handsome male chimp.
White beard, paleish face, long, black shining hair.
He got to within ten yards and suddenly saw me.
His expression was one of amazement.
He stopped abruptly, stared, put his head on one side
and then on the other,
and then turned and continued off into the undergrowth.
David Greybeard was, without doubt,
the chimpanzee I remember with the most affection.
He was the first one who lost his fear of me.
He was the one who really helped me go into a magic world,
the world of the wild chimpanzees.
David Greybeard opened up to Jane Goodall what would become known as
the Kasekela community, named after the valley where she set up camp.
Instinctively, she concentrated on them as individuals.
Over the next 50 years, they would yield up a gold seam
of scientific revelation that is as rich today as it was then.
Flo and Olly were the two females
that spent a lot of time together
and I learned a lot about mothering skills from them and the close bonds
between mothers and offspring, between brothers and sisters.
Flo was to become the matriarch of successive generations
of what Goodall termed the F family.
Their unfolding relationships and real-life dramas
would turn them into household names.
Flint, Flo's son, was the first infant
whose development in the wild
could be recorded step by step and just about day by day.
Flint was seven, eight years old when I was there.
He behaved like a four or five year old.
He tried to ride on her,
he succeeded in riding on her, this poor old woman,
her son who was about half her body weight,
would sometimes whimper and beg her for a ride
and she didn't have the psychological strength to say no.
Fifi and I had a special relationship and she always seemed
to know when I was coming
and, sure enough, Fifi would somehow be there.
The mother-child relationship
is one of the strongest bonds in chimp society.
Their relationship remains close throughout their lives.
My mother had a huge influence on me,
I mean, I think everything I've done that I am a bit proud of is,
she was so wise, the way she brought us up.
For example, you know, the sorrows of childhood that seem so huge,
she would say, "Well, go and get a book, go and lose yourself in a book
"and then, when you come out of that world, you'll find it's better."
So that was one piece of advice.
My father couldn't have had influence on me because he wasn't
there while I was growing up because my parents divorced when I was 12
and that was the end of the war, and he went off when I was five.
Though they play little part in the raising of their infants,
male chimpanzees form strong ties with each other.
Well, it is interesting that two brothers
who were adjacent in the birth order
could be so different,
in the sense that Freud was always the thoughtful one,
the one who achieved what he achieved quietly and,
apparently with more planning,
whereas Frodo has always been the tough guy,
the problem chimp, if you will.
Frodo is a particularly rough character.
He's so tough, he's like the big bully at school
who is so individually powerful,
that it's as if he doesn't need his allies so much.
Then, of course, he went on and took over the alpha male
from his older brother and then, when he was alpha male,
there was nothing you could do except pray, really,
hold on a tree trunk if he charged you.
CHIMPS SCREAM
I think I'm the first one who used the term soap opera
to describe what's going on.
Well, this person hates that person
and this person wants to have sex with that person
and this person feels like he would be,
like to be good friends with that person,
but is afraid because that other person is higher ranking.
Absolutely, it's what happens,
and it's also absolutely the material of chimp drama.
It's really quite the same.
It is around this group of chimpanzees
that Jane Goodall has built her extraordinary career.
Over the last 50 years, Gombe has become a world famous National Park.
And Dr Goodall still maintains her relationship with it
and the people who live on its borders.
So, first of all, how did I ever come to Africa
when I was born far away in England?
HE TRANSLATES
When I was eight years old, and some of you here are eight years old,
I knew I wanted to go to Africa.
All that I remember of my childhood was loving animals
and wanting more and more animals and reading books about animals.
The first book I ever owned of my own was the story of Doctor Dolittle
and, in that book, he takes animals from the circus back to Africa.
There's a picture, still in my mind,
of Doctor Dolittle walking across this bridge of monkeys,
they're holding hands with each other, to escape an enemy
and, I don't know, that just got me into Africa.
And then, of course, Tarzan, Tarzan of the Apes,
marrying that other stupid wimpy Jane,
of whom I was frightfully jealous.
I didn't want to be Tarzan,
I wanted to be a proper mate for him, which I new I could have been,
and as he existed as reality in my mind,
there's no point my trying to be him, so what can I be?
I can be a decent mate for him.
HE TRANSLATES
But everybody laughed at me.
How would I get to Africa when we had no money?
And back then, we didn't know very much about Africa
and it was a very faraway place,
and going to Africa would be a big adventure,
and girls didn't have big adventures like that, it was only the boys.
When I left school we had no money for university,
so I learned how to be a secretary,
because my mother said maybe then you get a job in Africa.
The next thing that happened was I had a letter from a school friend
whose parents had gone to Africa and she invited me for a holiday.
Yes, so there was an opportunity and I worked and I worked and I worked
and after months, I had enough money to go to Africa by boat.
HE TRANSLATES
The Africa that Goodall went to in the late '50s
was still under British colonial rule.
There were opportunities for anyone with aspirations
to get close to wildlife.
And after a little while,
I heard about a man who was very famous, called Louis Leakey,
and he knew a lot about animals.
So I went to see Louis Leakey
and he asked me many, many questions about animals.
Louis Leakey was the foremost
primate palaeontologist in the 1950s,
that's to say, he was the one who was looking for fossil evidence
of mankind's ancestry
and he discovered this one site, the Olduvai Gorge,
where there were a whole succession of rock beds going through the
critical period of history when humanity was just emerging.
And he it was, who saw the value of looking at other living primates,
to shed light on what the fossils were telling him.
Leakey's belief in humankind shared ancestry with the great apes
has been borne out by science.
Now what we know, as a result of the genetic discoveries,
is that something around five million years ago,
we shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees.
When we go into any of these forests with chimpanzees,
it's like a time machine.
We're going in and seeing a species that is really quite similar
to the one that gave rise to our lineage five million years ago,
so that means that it tells us something about
the likely kinds of social relationships
that our species had then, our ancestors, and more confidently,
about their capacities, their cognitive capacities.
So these amazing beasts are telling us how we got started.
They're telling us where we came from.
Jane Goodall would be the first of three women who Dr Leakey launched
on missions to study our closest relatives.
Later known as Leakey's Angels,
they were to become international celebrities,
more famous than the man himself.
Birute Galdikas was sent off on a quest
to study orang-utans in Borneo, where she still works today.
Dian Fossey was despatched to the mountains of Virunga
to follow mountain gorillas.
She was later murdered
before the making of the film Gorillas In The Mist.
People often ask why Leakey chose young women.
I think he felt that a human female
would be somehow less threatening to a male gorilla or a male chimpanzee.
I'm not sure whether that was true, I think it's to do with personality.
It's to do with the ability to sit quietly and not make a fuss.
And there's one more thing, and I've had this proved, that our voice
is less threatening to a chimpanzee than the voice of a man.
A man's voice is more like their threat bark
and a woman's is, generally...well, certainly if it's a voice like mine,
is much more peaceful and, and less agitating.
He was taking a risk with them because, you know,
Jane could easily have been killed by one of her, the big male chimpanzees,
so being one of Leakey's Angels was quite a risky business.
When it came to Louis Leakey, there were other risks involved.
He invited her over and, so you can ask, well, you know,
what was Leakey thinking?
And I think there were two levels of thought.
One was, "Hmm, this is an attractive young woman here."
Leakey was a lecher,
he was, you know, he had just had an affair with his previous secretary
and he was attracted to young women.
It was very difficult because, you know, I was terrified
that if I kept saying no, that that would ruin my chances
of going to study the chimpanzees.
It was a very difficult time.
'I stayed firm and, by this time,
'he was well committed to finding the money to send me to Gombe.'
And so he told me I could come to Gombe National Park
and try and learn about chimpanzees.
And this was amazing because chimpanzees are more like
human beings than any other animal in the world.
'Louis particularly chose me because I hadn't got a degree of any sort.'
He felt that, you know, the ethologists at the time
were very rigid and very reductionist
and, you know, he wanted somebody who saw things as they were.
Jane finally arrived at what was then Gombe Stream Nature Reserve
on 14th July, 1960.
When I arrived, I felt that at long last my childhood ambition
was being realised.
But when I looked at the wild and rugged mountains
where the chimpanzees lived,
I knew that my task was not going to be easy.
My mother was with me those first four months
because I wasn't allowed to be on my own by the British authorities
and she volunteered to come.
Louis Leakey was very anxious that it was somebody
who wouldn't be competitive, but who would be totally supportive.
He felt that that was a prerequisite for whoever came
and, of course, she more than filled the bill.
And the person who helped me lived right here in Mwamgongo.
HE TRANSLATES
And that was Jumanne Kikwale's father, Rashidi.
Jumanne was seven years old when I came to Gombe.
I first met Jane in 1960.
At the time, I was seven years old and I was living with my father,
so they arrived and we pull out the boat and we greeted them and we
helped them carrying their goods to where they are going to stay.
Jane's mother, to make a good relationship with the people,
she set up a small clinic to help them.
I was helping her, giving people medicine.
Mum set up this little clinic.
She made some amazing cures,
she cured tropical ulcers, became known as a white witch doctor.
So she established this great relationship
with all the local people
and that was an enormous help to me and the students who came after me.
When I first got to Gombe,
my concern was that the chimpanzees are very conservative,
they've never seen a white ape before and they just ran away.
So my concern was, there I was in my beautiful forest world,
that I dreamed of as a child,
and yet, I knew that if I didn't make some kind of breakthrough,
we only had money for six months,
and not only would it be the end of the study,
but I would have let Louis Leakey down, you know, my mentor.
Wild chimpanzees were still an unknown entity in 1960.
Earlier research projects by male academics
had produced little useful information.
There were a couple of Americans who had studied wild apes,
and Adrian Kortland, who preceded Jane in the study of chimps
by about two or three months,
spent the equivalent of about eight weeks, total,
watching chimps from inside blinds
because he felt they were too dangerous to show himself to.
But Jane did something very different,
she studied them always showing herself, not trying to hide,
but instead, trying to overcome their fear by gradually getting closer
and also trying to look as boring as possible when she watched them.
Now, the really shocking thing was that here was this young girl
going to Africa in a pair of shorts and a shirt,
wandering around in full view of the chimpanzees
and actually making contact with them and becoming friendly with them.
Nobody had ever done this before, this was unique.
Absolutely extraordinary because chimpanzees can tear you,
literally tear you, limb from limb.
Chimpanzees, amongst the general public, have a reputation
of being charming and funny and so on,
but that's because you nearly always, in zoos,
saw young chimpanzees, baby chimpanzees.
But anybody who's seen chimpanzees in the wild
know that when they grow up, and particularly the males,
they are very, very strong animals and can often be very aggressive.
It let Jane do something that nobody else had done
and that was to make really detailed,
close studies of chimpanzees in the wild.
It was at this time that I began to recognise a number
of different individuals.
As soon as I was sure of knowing a chimpanzee,
if I saw it again, I named it.
Some scientists feel that animals should be labelled by numbers,
that to name them is anthropomorphic,
but I've always been interested in the differences between individuals
and a name is not only more individual than a number,
but also far easier to remember.
It was her favourite, David Greybeard,
who would lead Goodall to the discoveries
which would change science.
I saw this dark shape hunched over a termite mound.
I could see the hand reach out and pick a piece of grass.
He was making arm movements as though he's sliding it across
the ground or something like that, and obviously eating.
But that was all I saw and then when he left, I saw it was David,
I saw this white beard, and I went up to the heap
and there were the pieces of grass lying there,
termites moving about the surface.
So I picked up one of these abandoned tools and pushed it
into the mound and the termites bit on and it was pretty obvious.
And at that time we were defined as man the toolmaker
and it was supposed to make us more different than anything else
from the rest of the animal kingdom.
People were saying, you know, man the toolmaker,
that was the de facto definition of humans,
we're these animals who make tools,
and then we discovered another set of animals who make tools,
in fact, there are lots of animals that make and use tools,
so now it's not unusual,
but it was an amazing discovery and it really did launch her career.
I sent Louis Leakey a telegram and he sent his famous reply,
"Now we have to redefine man,
"redefine tool or accept chimpanzees as humans."
But what is so remarkable about Jane Goodall's first six months in Gombe
was that she made not just one ground-breaking discovery but two.
She also demolished the belief of the time
that chimps were peaceful herbivores.
I was sitting on the peak, as I did for hours every day.
I looked across, and a chimpanzee climbed up a tree
with something in his mouth.
It looked as though he was licking this pink thing,
and my binoculars just weren't powerful enough,
I really couldn't see,
but there were a couple of bush pigs down below,
and when the juvenile would climb down,
one of the pigs would charge the child,
and I put two and two together and thought,
"Well, this must be a little pig."
So I wasn't positive, that first time.
I think the next thing I saw was a chimpanzee hunting a red colobus.
There were two colobus,
one of whom was a female with a baby up a tree, emerging from the canopy,
and there were three or four adults and an adolescent.
The adolescent was creeping up the trunk
towards these two adult monkeys,
and the other adult chimps were sitting around.
Clearly, they were stationing themselves
so wherever those monkeys jumped, there would be a chimp to intercept.
But, in fact, the adolescent grabbed the infant from the mother
and raced down the tree, and I could see them eating it.
Fascinated. Because, after all, Louis sent me there,
because he believed that we might learn something
about how our earliest ancestors might have behaved and, of course,
we all know that they were hunters and there were chimpanzees -
thought to be vegetarians - actually hunting,
so they were hunting and they were using and making tools.
That was exactly perfect for Louis Leakey's ideas.
These discoveries won her the extra funding
she needed to continue researching at Gombe.
Louis Leakey had enticed the National Geographic Society
to come up with a grant.
The National Geographic saw, early on, that this...English...girl,
beautiful girl,
wandering about Africa, was extremely newsworthy
and was very exciting,
and so they not only had...
articles about her, photographs of her,
but they commissioned a film.
The cameraman they sent was a young Dutchman, Baron Hugo Van Lawick.
The National Geographic wanted a lecture film,
which would be used by Jane,
and they warned me
that I probably wouldn't get any material on chimps,
cos they were very shy.
But that didn't matter,
as long as I got material on her and how she lived there and so on.
Of course, personally, I wanted to get the material on chimps.
Now, they sent me there for six weeks, that was the brief,
but I actually stayed for three months.
I very well remember the day Hugo arrived. I'd never met him
and I came down from the hills, and there had been a fire,
and I was all black, and Hugo told me afterwards
he thought that I'd done it for show,
that I'd sort of made myself all black,
until he climbed up and found out that that wasn't true.
Anyway, there was this young, extremely handsome,
Dutch nobleman, and I thought, "Well, this is going to be OK."
Their shared interest in wildlife blossomed into love
and subsequently marriage.
And I remember getting a telegram saying, "Do you like emeralds?"
And I sent a telegram back saying, "Love emeralds, love you."
Meanwhile, Goodall's discoveries were stirring up interest
among the great and good of the British zoological establishment
and ruffling some feathers.
Early in 1962, there was a conference at the London Zoo
on the behaviour of primates, and Jane was present.
Her first results were in and they were very exciting.
In one particular respect, she had given us some new ideas
about the sexual behaviour of chimpanzees.
Chimps are very promiscuous. What she first observed
was that there were many females and many males,
and the females mated with all the males,
and the males mated with all the females.
But it's different from gorillas, for example,
where, in general, you have several females
and just one silver-backed male,
and he is the one who mates with the females.
But in groups like baboons,
where there are many males and many females,
it not just the alpha male fathering the infants,
although he has the advantage, as they do in chimps.
Goodall's observations contradicted
another accepted belief about primates -
that the dominant male in a group had exclusive access to the females.
The main proponent of the idea that alpha males had harems
was the kingpin of British science, Sir Solly Zuckerman.
'He's called the Chief Scientific Adviser,
'but he's really much more than that.
'He's the main ambassador of scientists to the Government,
'and all through Whitehall, you'll hear people saying,
' "Sir Solly says..." '
Solly Zuckerman was Louis Leakey's bete noire, for one.
He studied hamadryas baboons in the zoo. Therefore, they had...
all monkeys, and the chimpanzees as well, had a harem system,
he was convinced.
And when I was giving my first paper, he was chairman.
We were outraged when one of the elderly primatologists present
suggested that this somehow reflected Jane's sexual behaviour,
that she was simply seeing the chimpanzee as a reflection
of her own sexual behaviour,
which we thought was absolutely outrageous,
and I remember getting up and asking a question and trying
to get Jane to defend herself against these...scurrilous remarks.
Desmond Morris, who believed that chimpanzees didn't have harems
and now had me to prove it, asked me this question,
and Solly turned and asked somebody else for a question.
This happened three times, and the third time, Desmond turned
and asked me directly, which was against all protocol.
So I didn't quite know what to do, but I answered.
I remember coming out of that conference seething with anger
and afterwards, I got a letter
from Solly Zuckerman, and it ends with this sentence.
He said,
"I want you to know about my anxiety, lest a subject which has been usually
"marked by unscientific treatment
"should continue in the unscientific shadows because of glamour."
He was telling me that I was being led astray by glamour -
this beautiful young blonde - who was out there with, you know, sort of...
Beauty and the Beast, Tarzan and the Apes and so on,
and was accusing me of being led astray by Jane's glamorous appearance
and was accusing her
of misinterpreting the chimpanzees' behaviour.
Which, you know, I think's very funny.
Today it's considered... I mean, oh, it's awful
and it's cos Jane's a girl and it's got all these twists to it,
but I just found it funny.
In 1965, National Geographic launched its new star on television.
20 million homes tuned in to the first showing
of Miss Goodall And The Wild Chimpanzees.
It was to be the first of many documentaries.
One of the reasons that people did romanticise Jane and her work
is because of those early National Geographic films
that just show her kind of wandering through forested glades
with kind of beams of sunlight kind of shining
on her beautiful blonde hair.
It was all kind of rather Timotei shampoo advertisement,
in some ways, whereas it's not quite the reality of it!
I've often thought that it was just one of the other gifts
my parents - combined, I suppose - gave me...
a certain attractive appearance, which served
the Geographic very well, served Louis Leakey very well
and probably helped to spread the message.
So if you get a gift, use it.
While National Geographic helped to provide the fame and glamour,
Jane Goodall also received the academic recognition
that had been denied her a few years earlier.
In 1966, Cambridge University awarded her
a doctorate for the contribution to the science of chimpanzee behaviour.
Her studies had been made a great deal easier
when the chimps began to visit her camp in search of bananas.
Provisioning wild chimps
with bananas would later prove to be a controversial decision.
It was accepted practice at the time
and greatly enhanced the study of chimp behaviour.
It is the easiest way to communicate with an animal to offer it food.
One is you drawing it in,
but you also saying, "I don't want to hurt you."
So it's a kind of universal language amongst all animals, isn't it?
To be honest, it would take decades
to get that kind of proximity
to chimps without using bananas to speed up the process.
Jane and Hugo's son was born in 1967.
Christened Hugo, it wasn't long before they renamed him Grub.
When Grub was very little, he didn't want to eat solid foods.
At the time, the chimp Goblin was about the same age
and Goblin always was covered with straw and earth
and banana all over himself, so he became known as Goblin Grub
and so Grub became known as Grublin Gob.
That was his original name.
'When I was very young,'
up to the age of four,
I spent most of my time up at chimp camp in...
in a cage, basically.
We, unfortunately, know that chimpanzees
occasionally eat human babies.
Their favourite prey, at least in our area, is other primates
and so we built a cage,
it was a very safe, strong cage, and that was
inside the room up at the chimp camp
and that's where Grub was before he could walk and then we had
a caged-in veranda down on the beach
where the chimps don't go very often for when he was older.
But he never could be outside that cage without responsible adults.
And I remember the feeding time for the chimps,
when the bananas were being fed to the chimps
because they always became very excited at that point
and that was always
when I became fearful because they'd make a lot of noise.
CHIMPS SCREAM
And display outside the window
and jump up on the bars
and to me, it was like they were trying to get in to attack me,
so for me it was quite scary at the time.
CHIMPS SCREAM
The sound is really very terrifying when the chimps become excited and,
you know, at Gombe, with the hills around, the sounds echo.
SCREAMS ECHO
You know, the sounds are coming
from everywhere and it's very, very frightening.
Grub's experiences at chimp-feeding time lead to a strong preference
for the house beside the lake.
After that time, of course, I'd see the chimps
from time to time down on the beach, but I would never go back up
to chimp camp up in the forest
and basically, once I could put my foot down and say no,
that's what I said was no and "I'll stay down on the beach
"and keep away from them, basically".
I always had this fear of chimps until, I mean, even now,
I don't feel comfortable
going up into the forest with the chimps.
It's not exactly a phobia,
but I definitely don't feel comfortable around the chimps.
Apart from raising a child, and running an expanding team
of young researchers, Goodall wrote In The Shadow of Man,
an immediate bestseller.
She's a natural storyteller. She manages to
assemble a very diverse set of confusing information
into elegantly-described accounts that fit stories.
"Old Flo lay on her back in the early morning sunshine,
"her belly full of palm nuts
"and suspended Flint above her,
"grasping one of his minute wrists
"with her large horny foot."
"As he dangled, gently waving his free arm and kicking with his legs,
"she reached up and tickled him
"in his groin and his neck
"until he opened his mouth in the play face or chimpanzee smile."
After In The Shadow Of Man came out,
I think it made her so famous she was
getting stacks of fan mail every time the mail boat came.
And I remember seeing this one particular picture in it,
which I still have quite vividly in my mind,
of her camp that she set up with her mother Vanne
when she first arrived
and I remember just thinking, now, that's where I want to live.
That's my ideal home,
bit of washing and a cooking pot outside
and I thought that was just fantastic.
It was not long after publication
that one of the book principal characters died.
"Although I knew that Flo had become very old indeed,
"it was still a sad day when I found her dead body lying in the stream.
"For me, it was like losing an old friend."
Jane was certainly very upset
because she had known Flo for so long
and more than that, Flo had meant so much
because it was the introduction
to the Flo family that had really been the breakthrough
in terms of getting to know individual differences so very well.
Flo had an obituary in the Sunday Times, which I wrote.
I think it was one of the very, very few obituaries
to a non-human or other than human animal.
I just wrote that, that there was this wild chimpanzee that
I'd learned so much about and spent so many wonderful hours with
and she taught me such a lot
and it was sad from the point of view of what we were learning,
but also, you know, she had her own wild individuality
and person and that I would mourn that.
But the sense of loss was felt most by Flo's son, Flint.
For Flint, of course, even though he'd been, you know, mean to her,
was desperately psychologically attached to her
and then there was the extraordinary three weeks
when Flint barely moved more than
15 yards away from where her body had collapsed on the edge of the stream.
Astonishingly, he just grew weaker and weaker and died.
When the people doing the postmortem
could find no particular problem with him,
then the concept of him dying
from a broken heart seemed really perfectly reasonable.
Until now, Hugo's camerawork
had captured many of the key events at Gombe,
but the pursuit of their separate career paths led to estrangement
and eventually divorce in 1974.
The remote forest that Goodall once explored alone
was now filled with young
researchers from the universities of the United States and Europe.
Gombe had also been made a National Park
with the help of the man who became her second husband, Derek Bryceson.
She was to nurse him through a long period of cancer
before he died in 1980.
In her absence, researchers continued to record
the succeeding generations of Gombe chimps.
Flo's daughter Fifi
was to be the mother of yet more charismatic members of the F family.
The family line is very, very plentiful.
Fifi had nine infants.
Only two of those died,
so she's now got five or six completely adult offspring,
children, grandchildren and even a couple of great-grandchildren.
But now this community of world famous chimps
began to reveal a more sinister side.
Having shown themselves to be voracious hunters of other primates,
they now began to slaughter their own kind.
The main study community, the Kasekela community, got rather
a lot of males, there were like 17 and normally, you know, 10 was big.
So the community began to divide
for whatever reason and a smaller part of it was seven males
and four adult females moved off to the south
and gradually kind of took over part of the range
they all had once shared.
And then the males of the larger Kasekela community
began systematically invading the heart of this territory
the southerners had carved out for themselves
and if they found an individual, attacking
and attacking brutally and leaving them to die of their wounds.
They annihilated an entire community that way.
What was fascinating about it is that they clearly show
a differentiation between my group and the other group
and so the split off individuals, who they knew,
it was like a civil war, really.
They treated them in ways that we'd never seen them treat an individual
of their own community, ways which you see when they're hunting
and trying to kill an adult prey animal.
It was horrible, I mean, cupping the victim's head as he lay bleeding
with blood pouring from his nose and drinking the blood.
Twisting a limb to try and twist it off,
tearing pieces of skin with their teeth.
Never see that in a fight within a community
and yet these were individuals they travelled with,
fed with, played with, grown up with.
The chimp-on-chimp violence in Gombe was a sensation.
Some academics wanted to cover it up.
Others said it was something peculiar to Gombe.
They suggested that it arose from
the artificial conditions that came with the provisioning of bananas.
It was not a good idea to feed bananas to chimpanzees because it
distorts things from a situation, a context,
that you don't really have a good feeling for in the first place.
But how, my goodness, you know, here we have for the first time,
the opportunity for somebody to spend close time with a species
that she and no-one else in the world is recognising
to be astonishingly similar to humans.
We don't know if the banana-provisioning system
or some other feature of what Jane did in Gombe
could have affected the pattern of the killing,
but it is clear that it did not CREATE it.
Chimpanzees have a propensity to kill their neighbours.
Brutal forms of inter-communal violence have been observed among
communities that have never been provisioned with food.
The notion of chimpanzees being interested in the possibility
of being able to launch brutal attacks on a neighbouring male
is quite clearly supported by what we see in
the community that I and my group study
and also by the studies in a nearby community in Kibale at Ngogo.
They've seen many brutal and killing attacks.
At first, I didn't want to believe it.
It went against all that I'd always thought,
that they were like us, but nicer than us.
But at the same time, once I accepted it,
because of what was happening, it made them even more fascinating.
It helped us, I think, understand ourselves a bit better,
our evolutionary history.
At Gombe, ferocious attacks
on outsiders have continued spasmodically over the years.
And recently, the most notoriously brutal, even sadistic,
male has been Frodo, Fifi's second son.
Here seen mortally wounding a young adolescent.
In 2002, he brought Gombe back
into the international spotlight by killing
a human child.
TRANSLATION: I was overwhelmed by the sudden attack.
The chimpanzee started unwrapping the cloth
I'd tied my baby to my back with
and then ran off with my child.
Well, I was pretty horrified,
but it was something which we had predicted might happen.
Frodo was a great hunter.
Chimpanzees are known to hunt small human children,
just as they hunt small monkeys, and it was a shock, but, as I say,
we had actually thought it might happen and that's why
it was so unfortunate
that this woman felt she had to go through the park with her child,
which she wasn't allowed to do.
I was not particularly surprised because outside Kibale, in my own
area, we had had a male who had killed several babies
in the villages to eat them.
Although Frodo's killing of a human baby stirred
some interest in the British press,
neither Jane Goodall nor the Tanzanian authorities
saw any need to take any form of retribution on the chimpanzee.
Nobody ever suggested killing Frodo, not the national parks,
not anybody and I think even the family realised
that although it was a tragedy, it wasn't really Frodo's fault.
Frodo, a chimp capable of such bestial behaviour, is known
to be gentle and playful with the young chimps in his own community.
It seems that, as with humans,
an individual chimpanzee can be capable of terrible savagery
and yet, show apparent tenderness.
What we're learning from chimpanzees is what we see in humans
is very likely part of our biology.
When Dostoevsky says, "In every man a demon lies hidden",
that's what I feel about chimpanzees and the fact
that it's our closest relative
that is able to, on the one hand,
have extremely well-organised, courteous,
sensible relationships within groups and yet, at the same time is tempted,
as it were, to impose appalling
punishment on enemies,
the fact that you have this amazing combination
in our closest living relative,
and that it appears so vividly in ourselves,
clearly suggests that there is an underlying biology which is the same.
Across Lake Tanganyika, in the Congo, the darker side
of our own human nature has led to social upheaval
and atrocities on a vast scale.
GUNFIRE
Protracted civil war in the Congo
and ethnic conflict in neighbouring Burundi
caused thousands of refugees to settle around Gombe.
Their desperate search for food and timber, accelerated a process
of environmental destruction
that was already underway around the borders of the park.
When I looked down from the plane and flew over Gombe and
the surrounding area, I was totally horrified by the devastation.
It seemed to me that all the trees
had gone except those that had been planted for shade, introduced trees
and those in the very, very steep ravines
where even desperate farmers couldn't try to cultivate.
The slopes in many cases were completely infertile
and in some cases, because it was the dry season,
it really looked as though we were flying over desert land.
It was very clear that this was because there were more
people living there than the land could support,
swelled by refugees coming from Burundi and Congo
and I realised that there was no way to save the precious chimpanzees
while people were struggling to survive.
It became clear that chimpanzee populations all over Africa were
being threatened by destruction of their habitat
as well as being hunted for their meat.
Jane Goodall began to use her fame to campaign for conservation.
It wasn't a question of asking myself, well, do I really
want to give all this up and change, I just changed, just like that.
Jane has spent the last 25 years on a non-stop global mission
to promote conservation and animal rights.
I've been on the road, I can't remember, forever.
At the moment, she's travelling
around, ooh, 275, 280 days a year,
non-stop.
Just in October this year, Lubbock, Los Angeles, Portland,
Eugene, Spokane, Edmonton, Toronto, London, Kitchener, Hamilton.
How are you?
It's moving, it's lecturing, it's talking, but most days start
around 6.30-7. they rarely finish before midnight or 1am.
Oh, what a pleasure to meet you.
I have been on the road approximately 300 days every year.
The entire package of going into the forest, a sort of beauty
and the beast kind of thing,
saving up the money, being picked up by National Geographic
and, yes, becoming a cover girl,
that's all tied up in giving a certain mystique
which is incredibly useful to open doors.
And I would like to bring you
the voice of these amazing beings with whom we share the planet
and I would like to bring you the sound which,
before too long, may not be heard any more in the forests of Africa,
the sound made by contented chimpanzees
when they've had a good day, their stomachs are full,
they're getting ready to spend the night
under the African stars or the moon, lying in their leafy tree top beds.
Hoo-hooo-hooo-hooo!
Haa!
This sound has not been heard before in this room, I'm sure of that.
LAUGHTER
But it needed to be heard.
It's a voice that is heard strongest around Gombe, the launch pad for her
Roots & Shoots youth movement,
promoting care for animals and the environment.
It has spread to over 120 countries.
The Jane Goodall Institute raises $15 million a year for Gombe,
Tanzania and conservation in general
and in 2002, the United Nation's Kofi Annan
made her a UN messenger of peace.
Yet above all, she still represents the chimpanzees.
Chimpanzees show so many amazing commonalities with humans.
The long-term friendly bonds between members of the family,
the communication patterns that include kissing, embracing,
holding hands, patting one another
on the back, the fact that they can co-operate to solve a problem,
they can use and even make tools.
Of course,
like us, they have a brutal side to their nature,
they are capable of behaviour like a kind of primitive war,
but they also show behaviour
that is like our compassion and love and altruism.
The unfolding drama of life among the chimps of Gombe
is still the inspiration for new ground-breaking research
and Dame Jane Goodall campaigning and fundraising
has now begun to reverse the environmental devastation
there and in other parts of Africa.
It is this absolute determination to succeed against the odds
which explains how half a century ago
she entered a remote African forest
and transformed our understanding of chimpanzees and ourselves.
What do you do when you've had enough of an interview?
Oh-ho!
That do? Oh-oh!
Oh-oh!
And that means? Go away!