Gombe Nationa Park and Jane Goodall’s Chimpanzee Project

Jane Goodall’s forty-five year chimpanzee project has not only sought protection of wild great apes, but has done this through promoting public knowledge of their many common grounds with us.

Jane Goodall was twenty-six years old when she first touched down near Gombe National Park in Tanzania, where she encountered the Kasakela community of common chimpanzees. Naturally, the community was mistrusting at first and Jane had to earn enough trust to progressively closen herself to them. But over time, Goodall made several major discoveries that smoothed out the jagged edge between the “human” and “animal” kingdoms that were still at the time prevalent, even in primatology.

Jane Goodall observed that chimpanzee communities function similarily to a small human town or village. She found the community housed several families. Like human communities, the Kasakela had a political hierarchy. Families were higher or lower on that totem pole based primarily on the number of alpha males they produced.
She labeled the community’s two high-up families the “F” and “G” family, which enabled Goodall to name rather than number her subjects; a first in the science world.

It was already known that chimpanzees occasionally made primitive tools, but generally assumed amongst the scientific community that tool-making and use was solely a human trait. Goodall observed subject David Greybeard making and using a plant-based contraption to extract termites from wood, but corrected science that tools are far more prevalent in chimpanzee culture than humans knew when she also found David Greybeard and another chimp, Goliath, making more termite-picking tools. Humans had also misconceived chimpanzees to be monkey-like in their diet, eating only fruits and vegetables. But after seeing the chimpanzees eating meat, Goodall confirmed that, much like humans, they are omnivorous.

But lessening the divisions seen by humans between us and great apes was only one facet of Jane Goodall’s efforts to protect chimpanzees. Goodall co-founded the Jane Goodall Institute, an international organization devoted to both educating the public and defending the environment and the rights of animals; a notable offshoot of this is the Roots & Shoots program, which reaches out to kids. Jane has also given her support to the Forests Now Declaration and the Optimum Population Trust, and was president of Advocates for Animals for ten years.

Goodall has worked toward the protection of chimpanzee habitats, an end to great ape poaching and general chimpanzee and animal rights.