New Delhi: For the little girl who grew up in war-ravaged England in the 1940s, the stories of Tarzan and Dr Dolittle, who lived in the jungles of Africa with their wild companions, were to change her life forever. Determined to share a forest home with African animals, she grew up to be Jane Goodall, the world’s foremost authority on chimpanzees today.Goodall’s observations and discoveries are now intemationally heralded. Her research and writing have made, and are making, revolutionary inroads into scientific thinking regarding the evolutions of humans. Goodall, who will be visiting India in the second week of January, will deliver a lecture on chimpanzees at the India International Centre in New Delhi on January 13, 2003. The programme is being organised by the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI).
Jane Goodall was born in London, England, on April 3, 1934, and grew up in Bournemouth on the southern coast of England. On her second birthday, Jane’s father bought her a beautiful, life-like toy chimpanzee named Jubilee in honor of a baby chimpanzee born at the London Zoo. Friends warned her parents that such a gift would cause nightmares for a child. But Jane loved the toy, and to this day Jubilee sits on a chair in her home in England.
Chimp life was still a mystery in 1957, when, on a trip she had saved for years to make, Goodall landed in Kenya to visit a high school friend. Here she came into contact with Louis Leakey, a prominent anthropologist working at a Kenyan museum who would later become famous for his discoveries of early human remains at the Olduvai Gorge. Goodall began assisting Leakey in his studies, doing everything from documenting monkey behaviour to hunting for fossils. Leakey, in turn, encouraged her to study chimpanzees, animals that he believed could provide us a window into our own beginnings.
Most scientists were sceptical at Leakey’s suggestion that a young woman who had never gone to college could succeed as a lone field researcher in the chimpanzees’ rugged mountain home. Nevertheless, in 1960, Goodall began her research at Gome Stream National Park in the East African nation of Tanzania.
Within a few years she became intimately familiar with the lives of chimpanzees, spending her days trailing them through the forest and recording their habits. What many researchers had earlier believed to be “primitive” apes living a simple existence, she found highly intelligent, emotional creatures living in complex social groups. Her research went on to shatter two long-standing myths: the idea that only humans could make and use tools, and the belief that chimps were passive vegetarians.
Goodall, who also went on to pen two books “Wild Chimpanzees” and “In The Shadow of Man”, lived at Gombe almost till 1975, buit by this time she had founded the Jane Goodall Institutes in nine countries, including Tanzania, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Now, Goodall continues her studies from afar, focusing her attention on a passionate campaign for chimpanzee conservation and research and speaking against the nonessential use of chimps in medical research. She travels worldwide raising funds for the half-dozen chimpanzee refuges she has established in Africa.
