The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times(5)
“Someone told me that if I was interested in animals, I should meet Leakey,” Jane said. “So I made an appointment to see him. I think he was impressed by how much I knew about African animals—I’d read everything I could about them. And guess what—two days before I met him his secretary had suddenly left, and he needed one. So you see, that boring old secretarial training paid off after all!”
She was invited to join Leakey; his wife, Mary; and Gillian, another young Englishwoman, on their annual dig at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, searching for early human remains.
“Toward the end of the three months, Louis began talking about a group of chimpanzees living in the forests along the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania, which at the time was called Tanganyika and still under British colonial rule. He told me that the chimpanzee habitat was remote and rugged and that there would be dangerous animals—and that chimpanzees themselves were four times stronger than humans. Oh, how I longed to undertake an adventure like the one Leakey was envisioning. He said he was looking for someone with an open mind, with a passion for learning, a love of animals, and endless patience.”
With Dr. Louis S. B. Leakey—the man who made my dream come true. (JANE GOODALL INSTITUTE/JOAN TRAVIS)
Leakey believed that an understanding of how our closest relatives behaved in the wild might shed light on human evolution. He wanted someone to do this study because, while you can tell a great deal about what a creature looked like from the skeleton and about its diet from tooth wear, behavior does not fossilize. He believed there was a common ancestor, an apelike humanlike creature, some six million years ago. He reasoned that if modern chimpanzees (with whom we share almost 99 percent of the composition of our DNA) showed behavior similar (or identical) to that of modern humans, it might have been present in that common ancestor and been part of our repertoire throughout our separate evolutionary pathways. And this, he thought, would enable him to better guess the behavior of our Stone Age ancestors.
“I had no idea he was thinking of me,” Jane said, “and I could hardly believe it when he asked if I was prepared to undertake this task!” Jane smiled as she recalled her mentor. “Louis was a true giant of a man,” she said, “in brilliance, vision, and stature. And he had a great sense of humor. It took a year for Leakey to get the money. The British administration initially refused to grant permission, horrified at the thought of a young white woman going off into the bush, but Leakey persisted and in the end they agreed, provided I did not go alone and had a ‘European’ companion. Louis wanted someone who would support me in the background, not compete with me, and decided Mum would be perfect. I don’t think he had to twist her arm very hard. She loved a challenge. The whole expedition would not have been possible without her.
Mum helped with pressing plants I collected that the chimpanzees were eating, as well as drying skulls and other bones that I found. We are in the entrance of our secondhand, ex-army tent. (JANE GOODALL INSTITUTE/HUGO VAN LAWICK)
“Bernard Verdcourt, the botanist at the Coryndon Museum, drove us overland to Kigoma—the closest town to Gombe—in an overloaded, short-wheelbase Land Rover on mostly dirt roads that were rutted and potholed. He later admitted that when he dropped us off, he never expected to see either of us alive again.”
Jane, however, was more concerned about how she could accomplish her mission than the potential dangers. Jane paused, and I prompted her to continue. “When you were at Gombe, you wrote a letter to your family saying, ‘My future is so ridiculous, I just squat here, chimp-like, on my rocks, pulling out prickles and thorns, and laugh to think of this unknown Miss Goodall who is said to be doing scientific research somewhere.’ Take me back to those moments of hope and hopelessness,” I said, eager to understand the uncertainty and self-doubt that she faced, especially when trying to do something that had never been done before.
“There were so many moments of disappointment and despair,” Jane explained. “Awakening before dawn each day, I would climb the steep hills of Gombe in search of chimpanzees, catching rare glimpses of them through my binoculars. I would creep and crawl through the forest, exhausted, my arms and legs and face scratched by the undergrowth, and finally I would come upon a group of chimpanzees. My heart would leap but before I could observe anything, they would take one look at me and run away.
“There was only six months of money to support my research, and chimps were just running away from me. The weeks became months. I knew, given time, I could get the chimps’ trust. But did I have the time? I knew if this did not happen, I would be letting Leakey down; he had put so much confidence in me, and the dream would come to an end. Yet most of all,” Jane continued, “I would never be able to understand these fascinating creatures—or what they could tell us about human evolution, which is what Leakey was hoping to better understand.”
Jane wasn’t an established scientist. She did not even have an undergraduate degree. Leakey wanted someone whose thinking was not already compromised by too much academic prejudice or preconceived beliefs. Jane’s breakthrough discoveries, especially about animal emotions and personalities, might never have been possible if she had been trained to deny that animals could have these, as was common in universities at the time.
It was fortunate for Jane that Leakey believed that women might make better field researchers—that they might be more patient and show more empathy toward the animals they were studying. After sending Jane into the forest, Leakey helped two other young women follow their dreams, finding funding for Dian Fossey to study mountain gorillas and Biruté Galdikas to study orangutans. The three women later became known as “the Trimates.”