Jane Goodall: The pioneering scientist who changed our understanding of chimpanzees

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“They greet each other with a kiss and a hug, and attach their hands on each other’s shoulders to provide reassurance. They hold hands that bite each other and make physical contact to relieve nervousness or tension. They are just like us.”

This is how Jane Goodall, one of the world’s foremost chimpanzee experts, describes the similarities between us and our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, but it doesn’t stop there.

“It was shocking to discover how similar we were,” Goodall says. “They might turn into savages sometimes and wage some kind of war between them, and their feelings might reach the level of altruism at other times. They show both sides of nature.”

Humans share 98.6 percent of their DNA with chimpanzees, however, the world knew little about them until the British scientist arrived in Gombe in western Tanzania in 1960.

Goodall spoke to the BBC about how her six decades of dedication helped make the world interested in primates (a mammalian order in the scientific classification of the animal kingdom), and how they could help us think about what a human is.

Goodall became famous in 1965 when her photo appeared on the cover of National Geographic magazine.

Her work has been the main focus of the documentary “Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees” – known in Arabic as “The Lady of the Chimpanzees.”

The documentary shows Mrs. Goodall walking barefoot in a dense forest, playing and wrestling with young chimpanzees. The movie also gives the impression that her work was incredibly romantic.

She recalls those moments of fame from her family home in Bournemouth on the south coast of England, and how she struggled and struggled to build that trust with chimpanzees, commenting: “I was treated like I was a predator.”

The chimpanzees were making aggressive gestures towards them. Screaming at her as they showed their teeth, they were shaking branches with their bristle hair.

“It was a terrible thing, she knew the chimpanzees were a lot stronger than her, but somehow she suppressed her fear.”

“It took four months before I could reasonably get close to one of them, and a year to sit with them. They had never seen anything as strange as this strange white monkey before.”

Then Goodall became friends with some of the group, and named some of them.

Goodall recalls “how David Graybeard took a banana from me and allowed me to take care of it, and another played with me.”

The scientist learned how to distinguish between different sounds and how chimpanzees use verbal and nonverbal communication. The similarities and differences with the human interactions piqued her curiosity.

She noticed that the chimpanzees “do not say goodbye, but walk away … Isn’t that pleasant?”

She saw a chimpanzee dance with a lot of movement, and she saw the little ones cling to their mothers. It also revealed their ability to make some tools.

“I saw his black hand (David Graybeard) pick the stems of weeds and push them down the piles of termites and get them out with the termite rattle in his jaws.”

Goodall was very enthusiastic and said, “He not only uses things as tools but also modifies them as tools.”

In our understanding of what chimpanzees are, this is a big step forward.

The British scientific community was skeptical about her methods and results when she returned to the UK to pursue her PhD at Cambridge University.

She said, “I could not go into the conversation that they have personalities and minds capable of solving problems and certainly not feelings,” as it was believed that these traits are unique to humans. Just

They said, “Chimpanzees should be called numbers, not names.”

“Many of those professors told me that I made mistakes in everything I did.”

Goodall’s success in teaching the world about chimpanzees has been remarkable.

Many who haven’t seen chimpanzees in real life have developed some kind of familiarity. The Times even wrote an obituary for the dominant mother of the group that Goodall was studying in Tanzania in 1972, when she died.

Two years later, there were many deaths.

The scholar recounted the details of the war between two groups: “A few males separated with some females and took over the southern chain that they all shared together in the past.”

Chimpanzees have a strict hierarchy of dominance, and since the group contains far too many males, splitting was inevitable, and what followed was really shocking.

The relationship between the two groups became very hostile, and the males of the larger group began attacking the males in the smaller group one by one, letting them die from the wounds and injuries they inflicted.

“They killed people who used to play and mate with them,” she recalls. “It was really horrible, the wounds they got were very frightening.”

The fighting – which Godall likened to the Civil War – lasted four years.

She said, “I thought they were like us, but nicer. But then I realized that they look like us more because they have this brutal side too.”

A decade later, in 1986, I went to a conference, and I remembered the horrific conditions that chimpanzees lived in in captivity.

“I went as a scientist and came back as an activist,” she recalls.

That switch prompted her to travel to the United States, and she set out to convince those who were using these monkeys in their experiments to change their ways. Indeed, I succeeded in that.

“In the United States, all 400 chimpanzees used by the National Institutes of Health are either in sanctuaries or awaiting construction for them.”

And in Africa, their habitat is shrinking, and hunting remains an issue.

It saw this coming in 1991 after the Gombe was reduced to a small island of woodland surrounded by completely barren hills.

“I was shocked that we cannot save chimpanzees without helping people live without destroying the environment,” she said.

She started the “Roots and Shoots” program through her Jane Goodall Institute to enable local people to take a leadership role in saving their forests and animals.

Goodall led a stressful life, spending nearly 300 days away from her home for several years.

Her work has inspired many young scientists, and strangers stop and talk to the 86-year-old woman at airports and ask her for a selfie.

But this scientist prefers to be alone in the wild, regardless of her accomplishments.

“I am a normal person who was lucky enough to do very interesting things in life,” she says.

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