In the Shadow of Man – by Jane Goodall
Date read: 12/18/22. Recommendation: 8/10.
Jane Goodall’s account of her life and lessons learned living among the chimpanzees of Gombe National Park. This book focuses on her first ten years in the field. Her beginnings—how she found her way to Gombe and met Dr. Louis Leakey are truly inspirational. And the stories she tells of her time in Africa with the chimps, how she got to know them, the behaviors she observed, and what that taught her about our own humanity will open your mind and ground you in something real.
See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.
My Notes:
Childhood:
Lived in a red-brick Victorian house in Bournemouth where she dreamed of one day going to Africa, living with animals, and writing books about them.
Books that inspired her: Doctor Dolittle, Tarzan, Beatrix Potter, and The Wind in the Willows.
“The years covered in this book were, perhaps, the happiest of my life, when I was immersed in the forest world I had dreamed of as a child.” JG
Fascinated with animals from an early age: One of her earliest memories (age four) was when her family went to a farm for a holiday. Goodall was asking questions about how hens lay eggs but she wasn’t getting a satisfactory answer. So she crawled into a henhouse and sat quietly for five hours in the corner just to see for herself. The entire house was searching for her and her mother called the police during that time.
When she was eight years old, she decided she would go to Africa and live with wild animals when she grew up.
Reaching Africa:
When she left school at eighteen, she took a secretarial course and two different jobs. When a school friend invited her to come stay at her parent’s farm in Kenya, she handed in her resignation the same day. She left a fascinating job at a documentary film studio in order to earn her way to pay for travel to Africa (it was difficult to save money in London) by working as a waitress during the summer in her hometown of Bournemouth.
A month after arriving in Africa, a friend suggested she should meet Dr. Louis Leakey—if she were interested in animals. She had already started an office job. But she went to see Leakey at the National Museum of Natural History in Nairobi where he was the curator at the time. It just so happened that his secretary recently quit so he offered the job to Goodall.
While at the museum she learned from the other naturalists and shared in their enthusiasm for animals. Soon after, Leakey offered Goodall a chance to join him and his wife, Mary, on their annual paleontological expedition to the Olduvai Gorge on the Serengeti plains.
Towards the end of their time at Olduvai, Leakey had seen how hard she worked and how much she loved interacting with the animals, so he mentioned a group of chimpanzees living near the shores of Lake Tanganyika in present-day Tanzania. He described their habitat and how rugged and remote it was. He emphasized the patience and dedication that would be required to study them.
Leakey asked Goodall if she would be willing to tackle the job of observing the chimpanzees at Gombe. Despite not having an official degree or scientific background to study animal behavior. Leakey wanted someone who was unbiased by current scientific schools of thought. He wanted someone who understood and connected with animals and was eager to learn.
After Goodall agreed to go, Leakey worked on raising the necessary funds. “He had to convince someone of the need for the study itself, and also that a young unqualified girl was the right person to attempt it. Eventually, the Wilkie Foundation in Des Plaines, Illinois, agreed to contribute a sum sufficient to cover the necessary capital expenses—a small boat, a tent, and airfares—and an initial six months in the field.” JG
Patience + Perseverance:
After arriving at Gombe to conduct her research, Goodall spent almost half a year trying to overcome the chimpanzees’ inherent fear of her. Whenever she accidentally got close, the chimps would run off into the undergrowth in a panic. In the early days, they wouldn’t even let her within 500 yards of them.
There were days and weeks she saw no sign of the chimpanzees at all. “Nevertheless, those weeks did serve to acquaint me with the rugged terrain. My skin became hardened to the rough grasses of the valleys and my blood immune to the poison of the tsetse fly, so that I no longer swelled hugely each time I was bitten. I became increasingly surefooted on the treacherous slopes, which were equally slippery whether they were bare or eroded, crusted with charcoal, or carpeted by dry, trampled grass. Gradually, too, I became familiar with many of the animal tracks in the five valleys that became my main work area.” JG
As the months went by, Goodall knew they were close to running out of funds and she didn’t have much observational evidence to keep the study alive. She was running out of time.
Three months in, she hiked to an open peak about 1,000 feet above the lake that had a good vantage point over one of the valleys. That morning a group of chimps appeared to feed on some fig trees near the stream in the valley. They were in plain sight, about 80 years away, the closest she had been which allowed her to better observe the chimps. This day was a turning point in her study. She began to recognize individuals and give them names. She was able to get her first glimpse of social behavior and how they made their nests.
One day from the peak she saw a small group of chimps just below her in the upper branches of a thick tree and noticed the chimps were eating meat—one of those chimps was David Graybeard who was always the least afraid of her and because of his comfort, the rest of the chimps became more comfortable around Goodall. This was the first groundbreaking discovery because previously it was believed that chimps were primarily vegetarians and fruit eaters. No one knew they would hunt and eat larger mammals.
Two weeks after she saw the chimps eating meat, she saw David Graybeard “squatting beside the red earth mound of a termite nest, and as I watched I saw him carefully push a long grass stem down into a hole in the mound. After a moment, he withdrew it and picked something from the end of his mouth.” This was another groundbreaking discovery and was one of the first observations of non-humans using and modifying objects as tools. It demonstrated the crude beginnings of toolmaking. Previously it was believed that humans were the only tool-making animal.
These observations (meat-eating and toolmaking) gave the study renewed life. Leakey was able to use these discoveries to secure funding from the National Geographic Society for another year of research.
Other toolmaking observations:
Stems and stick to capture and eat insects
Leaves to sop up water they can’t reach with their lips
Leaves to wipe dirt from their bodies and dap at wounds
Sticks as levers to enlarge underground bees’ nests
Cambridge:
Leakey helped Goodall get admitted to Cambridge University in 1961 after her initial research despite her not having an undergrad degree. She would work towards her Ph.D. in ethology (study of animal behavior). Wanted to make sure the scientific community didn’t have excuses to reject her observations and studies.
During this time, Goodall would spend time at Cambridge pursuing her Ph.D. and return to Gombe when she was finished with each term to continue her observations.
Differences of degree, rather than kind:
The scientific community informed Jane that it was inappropriate to talk of chimpanzees having personalities, minds capable of thought, or emotions similar to us. “In other words, there was a sharp line dividing ‘us’ from ‘them.’”
Accumulation of observations forced science to rethink its attitude toward animals. “It became increasingly clear that we are part of, and not separated from, the rest of the animal kingdom.”
Man’s awareness of himself is very different from the dawning awareness of the chimpanzee and this is a very important difference.
But chimpanzees have the ability to solve complex problems, make and use tools for different purposes, and operate in complex social structures with elaborate communication.