The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times(6)

“When I saw the rugged, mountainous terrain at the park,” Jane said, “I wondered how on Earth I would ever find the elusive chimpanzees, and it was not easy. Mum played a very important role. I would come back to camp depressed, because the chimpanzees had, again, just run away from me. But Mum would point out that I was learning more than I realized. I had discovered a peak where I could sit and overlook two valleys. And through my binoculars, I watched as they made sleeping nests up in the trees and traveled in different-sized groups. I learned what foods they were eating and their different calls.”


I fixed a camera in a tree and took a timed photo of me searching for signs of chimpanzees. (JANE GOODALL INSTITUTE/JANE GOODALL)



But Jane knew that it was not enough information to enable Leakey to get more money when the six-month grant ended.

“I wrote many letters to Leakey,” Jane recalled, “when the chimps were running away: ‘You’ve put all your faith in me and I can’t do it.’ And he’d write back and say, ‘I know you can.’”

“Leakey’s encouragement must have meant a lot to you.”

“Actually, he made it worse,” Jane insisted. “Every time he said, ‘I know you can do it,’ I was thinking, ‘But if I don’t, I’ve let him down.’ That was what really concerned me. He’d stuck his neck out getting money for this young, unknown girl. And how would he feel, and how would I feel, if I let him down?” She wrote to him again and again, in desperation. “‘It’s not working, Louis,’ I’d write. And he’d write back, ‘I know you can do it.’ In his next letter the word ‘KNOW’ was bigger and underlined. So I felt increasingly desperate.”

“There must’ve been something in his belief that you could do it that also encouraged you to get back out there,” I suggested.

“It probably encouraged me to work even harder, although I don’t know how I could have worked harder, as I was going out every morning at half past five and crawling about the forest or watching from my peak all day until it was almost dark.”

Those early days sounded like they were full of dangers, challenges, and obstacles. But Jane seemed undaunted. She told me how she once sat on the ground and watched a poisonous snake slither over her legs. And how she felt no animals would hurt her, as she was “meant to be there.” She believed the animals would somehow know that she meant them no harm. Leakey had encouraged this belief and, thus far, no wild animal had ever harmed her.

As important as her belief, Jane also knew how to behave around wild animals. In particular, she knew the most dangerous thing was to get between a mother and her child, or to confront a wounded animal or one that had learned to hate humans. “Leakey approved of how I had reacted at Olduvai when one evening, after a hard day’s work under the hot sun, Gillian and I were walking back to camp and I sensed something behind me—and there was a curious young male lion,” Jane said. He was adult-sized, but his mane was only just beginning to grow. She told Gillian they should simply walk away slowly and climb up the side of the gorge onto the open plain above.

“Louis said it was lucky we hadn’t run, or the lion might have chased us. He also approved of how I had reacted when we came upon a male black rhino. I said we should stand absolutely still, as rhinos don’t see well; and luckily I could feel the wind blowing toward us, so I knew our smell would be carried away from him. The rhino knew there was something odd and ran back and forth with his tail in the air, but finally, he trotted away. I think that these reactions—and my willingness to dig for fossils eight hours a day—are probably why Leakey offered me the chance of studying the chimps.”

In Gombe, Jane persevered, and slowly she won the trust of the chimpanzees. As she got to know them, she gave them names—as she had named every animal she had ever owned or watched. Later she would be told that it was more “scientific” to identify them by number. But Jane, never having been to college, did not know this—and she told me that even if she had, she is sure she would have named the chimpanzees anyway.

“David Greybeard, a very handsome chimpanzee with distinguished white hair on his chin, was the first to trust me,” Jane said. “He was very calm and I think it was his acceptance of me that gradually persuaded the others that I was not so dangerous after all.”

It was David Greybeard who Jane first observed using grass stems as tools to fish out termites from a termite mound—their earthen nest. And then she saw him stripping leaves from a leafy twig to make it suitable to use for the purpose. At the time Western science believed only humans were capable of making tools and that this was a main reason why we were separate from all other animals. We were defined as “Man the toolmaker.”

When Jane’s observations were reported, this challenge to human uniqueness caused a worldwide sensation. Leakey’s famous telegram to Jane said: “Ah! We must now redefine man, redefine tools, or accept chimpanzees as human!” David Greybeard was eventually named one of the fifteen most influential animals that ever lived by Time magazine.


David Greybeard on a termite mound with a grass tool in his mouth, taken just after first sighting of termite fishing. (JANE GOODALL INSTITUTE/JUDY GOODALL)



“David Greybeard and his tool using was the moment that changed everything,” Jane recalled. “National Geographic agreed to take on funding my research when the first grant ran out, and they sent Hugo to film it all.” Hugo van Lawick, the Dutch filmmaker who recorded Jane’s discoveries, ultimately became her first husband.