I was the least likely candidate for the job.
I'd never even seen a wild chimpanzee.
Looking back, it seems almost silly that I was chosen to come here.
Those first few months at Gombe were by far the most frustrating.
I could hear the chimps calling in the forest around me,
but they never let me get close to them
I was afraid that my money would run out
before I'd seen anything important,
and the project would be deemed a failure.
But, I refused to give up.
Fortunately, I'm quite pigheaded by nature.
Every morning I would leave camp and follow the same path
I'd climb the same hill and sit in the same spot...
and hope...
Running around and chasing after something unsuccessfully is one thing,
but sitting still and contemplating failure is a whole lot worse.
But then one day, it happened
I could see them on the other side of the valley watching me
Then they'd come closer
and perch in the trees, looking down at me.
Finally, they came right down onto the ground
I knew that I'd finally been accepted
the first time a mother let her infant chimp
actually come right up to me
I called that little chimpanzee fifi
and our friendship has lasted over 40 years
Africa has been my home for most of my life
After a long trip away,
I still get a tremendous surge of excitement
when I finally glimpse the beautiful beaches of Gombe.
In 1960, famed anthropologist Dr. Louis leakey
sent 26-year-old Jane Goodall to Tanzania
to study wild chimpanzees.
What she discovered would change
not only our understanding of chimpanzees,
but ultimately of human behavior itself.
What do you call it? Hunters.
The tiny Gombe Research Station that we started from scratch in the '60s
now seems enormous to me.
There are 15 full-time research assistants,
most of them local Tanzanians,
and many have brought up their families here.
My good friend Dr. Shadrack Kamenya,
is the director.
- Welcome back. - How's your family?
Elizabeth Lonsdorf is an American zoologist,
about the age I was when I first arrived at Gombe.
How was your trip?
There are many wonderful dedicated people here,
and there is still so much more to learn.
When I first come back to Gombe, I like to be alone.
To me, this is an enchanted forest,
the Garden of Eden.
Gombe National Park is a tiny pristine oasis
a mere ten miles long and two miles wide
nestled against the shore of Lake Tanganyika.
My love of animals began when I was a little girl.
I dreamed of going to Africa.
In fact, I fell passionately in love with Tarzan.
He had that wretched wife Jane.
Tarzan, of course, never materialized,
but I had found something, much, much better.
Among all the living creatures at Gombe,
there is perhaps only one single individual
who has been here longer than Jane Goodall herself,
and that is Fifi the chimpanzee.
This is the very same Fifi that reached out as an infant to touch me.
At 43, she's the matriarch of her community.
Like myself, She's become a mother and a grandmother,
though her children outnumber mine eight to one.
Thank God for that
Flirt is Fifi's eighth child, and she's doing very well indeed.
Fifi is the most successful mother we've ever had here,
and many of her offspring
have become high-ranking in their community
Fifi's 22-year-old son Frodo is a good example.
Frodo has risen to become
the dominant, or alpha, male of his group.
He's the biggest chimpanzee I've ever seen at Gombe,
and he's a bully.
He rules by brute force.
Even I have to be careful around Frodo.
He loves to throw rocks, especially to me.
Gremlin is my very favorite chimpanzee.
She has twins at the moment... Golden and Glitter.
They're only the third set of twins ever seen here.
It's hard enough for a mother to look after one baby at a time,
and no twins have survived this long before.
But Gremlin is the perfect mother,
and she has the perfect helper in her five-year-old daughter Gaia.
She's like a little angel, helping to raise the twins.
Young Titan is the result
of an entirely different style of upbringing.
He had an often indifferent mother,
and now he seems crave constant attention, good or bad.
The other chimps in the community provide it, whether they like it or not
Right from the start I decided to give each chimp a name
in order to keep track of who was who,
of who was doing what to whom.
I didn't know that this was simply not done in the scientific community,
I should have numbered them instead.
How lucky that turned out to be.
Equipped with their own names,
many of the chimps have become celebrities around the world
and found their way into people's hearts.
Jane's work with the chimpanzees made Gombe National Park famous
by the mid-1960s.
Research programs were expanded to include
several other inhabitants, like the red colobus monkey.
But it was the highly complex social behavior of the baboon
that attracted the most attention from scientists,
second only to the chimpanzee.
If I'd come to Gombe and never found any chimps,
I would have been perfectly happy to study baboons.
On the surface, they seem quite similar.
They're both primates, they're roughly the same size,
and they both live in complex social communities.
But when you look deeper, they couldn't be more different
Chimpanzees have stayed pretty much to the forest
and couldn't really survive anywhere else,
while the baboons are very adaptable
and have conquered a wide variety of habitats.
But one thing they do have in common
is their love of play.
Since their paths often cross and they eat much the same foods,
conflicts between these distant cousins are not uncommon.
But among the young at heart,
a row can easily turn into a romp.
Baboons and chimpanzees are among the few animals
known to play together in the wild.
Just when everybody's having fun,
out of nowhere comes Frodo to spoil everything.
After a period of chaos,
there follows a process of appeasement
where homage must be paid to the king.
Social grooming is the most important way
for chimpanzees to maintain their relationships and alliances.
Most alpha males will return the favor to their loyal subjects,
but Frodo rarely grooms anyone but himself.
Surprisingly, brutal as he may be,
Frodo has a soft and gentle side as well.
During the day, chimpanzees are content to spend time on the ground.
But as evening approaches, they seek the safety of the trees.
They make their way high above
to begin building nests for the coming night,
driven, perhaps, by an ancient memory from the distant past
Primates first appeared in the fossil record
over 50 million years ago.
The lemurs represent some of the earliest primates still living.
Monkeys and baboons occupy a different limb of the family tree,
with nearly 200 species around the world.
Around 20 million years ago, a new group emerged...
...the apes including the siamang and the gibbon.
And then there are the great apes...
The orangutans of the Pacific, the gorillas of central Africa,
and the chimpanzees.
All primates have a common genetic heritage.
But chimpanzees share an incredible 98.5% of their DNA
with an altogether different ape-
homo sapiens... us.
American biologist Elizabeth Lonsdorf
spends as much time trying to keep up to the chimpanzees
as she does studying their behavior.
Even after more than 40 years of uninterrupted research at Gombe,
there are still many unanswered questions.
We've never known the fathers of the chimps born at Gombe,
because mothers typically mate with more than one male.
Now advances in DNA testing
have allowed us to figure out who the father is
just by taking a simple fecal sample.
One of my objectives is to figure out
how much active teaching is going on.
Is the mother consciously demonstrating what she knows,
or is the infant simply observing what the mother would do normally?
Now that we have the benefit of video to work with,
we're able to analyze behavior in much finer detail.
So on this day I was just out with Gremlin and the twins.
- That's Goldie - This is Goldie.
- Yeah, with her little beard. - And Glitter.
It's exciting to know there's a new generation of researchers at Gombe,
like Shadrack and Elizabeth,
studying a whole new generation of chimpanzees.
Steal from Mum.
Because of the risk of the chimpanzees
catching human diseases,
we try to keep more of a distance between us than we used to.
With chimps like Titan,
it's better not to get too close anyway.
Around the big males, Titan gets put in his place.
When he's with the females and younger chimps,
it's a different story.
Something or other... Titan. - He's a thug.
With Titan around, you never know what's going to happen next
Titan is good with rocks,
but is careful to aim them at us and not at one of the full-grown males.
Rat
I wasn't at all surprised when the DNA analysis revealed
that Titan is, in fact, Frodo's son.
Frodo has always been extremely aggressive.
He rose to alpha male status
by ruthlessly wielding his great strength,
and the other males of the group are understandably wary of his presence.
Goblin, too, was once alpha male,
but now in his old age he wisely keeps a low profile.
Chimp politics are merciless.
Frodo deposed his own brother Freud
to rise to power.
But despite their rivalries, the males band together to defend their territory,
regularly patrolling the perimeter on the lookout for intruders
from neighboring communities.
After 14 years at Gombe,
it had become increasingly obvious
how much like us the chimpanzees were.
But in the back of my mind, I'd nursed the notion
that we humans had somehow taken the wrong turn.
It seemed that the chimpanzees were much kinder
and more gentle than we were.
Therefore, I was totally unprepared for what happened next
The brothers, Hugh and Charlie,
my old friend Goliath...
all gone.
My Garden of Eden almost overnight
had become a very, very dark forest indeed.
They were more like us than I could ever possibly have imagined.
What Jane had witnessed was all-out war
between Fifi's community and a splinter group to the south.
By the time it was over,
the entire southern population had been annihilated.
I have seen so much here at Gombe...
political intrigue, cruelty, war,
but also love, compassion, and even humor.
Over the years, the perceived gap between humans and chimpanzees
had become smaller and smaller.
Every time I think I understand chimpanzee behavior,
they do something that takes me completely by surprise.
What Jane encountered, almost by accident,
turned out to be one of the most important discoveries
in the history of biology.
I was walking through the forest
when I spotted a hunched figure through the vegetation.
He had his back to me,
but I could see him stripping the leaves off a small twig,
then busying himself around he top of a termite mound.
I could see him pushing the twig into a hole in the mound.
I had no idea what he was up to.
But then he pulled out the twig
and expertly picked a few termites off it with his lips.
I was mesmerized.
I knew that what he had just done
was considered at the time to be outright impossible.
A mere nonhuman had just fabricated
a clever and effective tool right before my very eyes.
When Jane first described termite-fishing,
the ability to make and use tools
was considered one of the defining features
that set humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom.
We were known as "Man the Tool Maker."
In what has become a famous quote,
Dr. Louis Leakey wrote to Jane
that, "Now we will have to redefine tool,
"redefine man,
or accept chimpanzees as humans."
I've since discovered that all the Gombe chimpanzees
know how to termite-fish.
Predictably, Titan doesn't have the patience to stick with it for long.
The chimpanzees have even figured out a way
to fish for the vicious army ants.
I had been bitten by these ants,
and it is a really painful experience.
And yet even a little chimp like Gaia
is an expert when it comes to fishing for them,
something she learned from her mother Gremlin.
What's so fascinating about all of this
is that this technique of ant-fishing is unique to the Gombe chimpanzees,
a learned behavior passed down from parents to children.
This is not instinctive.
This is culture in the true sense of the word,
knowledge that flows from one generation to the next
Every chimpanzee community
has a unique set of traditional behaviors.
Some are practical, others are simply rituals,
the meaning of which we can only guess.
Following in Jane's footsteps,
researchers have studied groups of chimpanzees all across Africa,
and they have discovered a whole range
of culturally distinct behaviors.
At Gombe, males sometimes grab a branch
above their heads while grooming.
A hundred miles further south,
males clasp hands instead of grasping a branch.
Each group has adopted its own version of this grooming ritual.
The calls of chimpanzees within a community
are distinct from other communities.
They seem to imitate each other to create a group dialect
In some parts of Africa, chimpanzees use specific plants
to cleanse themselves of parasites in a form of self-medication.
In west Africa, chimpanzees use logs to break open palm nuts.
This behavior has never been seen elsewhere in Africa,
even though the same tools and nuts can be found in many habitats.
By studying chimpanzees, scientists are gaining insights
into what the earliest human cultures might have been like.
But just as these secrets are being unlocked
chimpanzee communities across Africa
are disappearing one by one.
When I realized how desperate the situation was,
I had to make a very difficult decision.
I knew I had to leave this place I loved so much
and go on the road to try to publicize the terrible plight of the chimpanzees
and their disappearing forests.
The first priority for Jane
was to try and save as much wilderness as possible.
National parks like Gombe are relatively safe havens.
But elsewhere, habitat destruction and poaching
have wiped out over 90% of the chimpanzee populations.
With the help of Jane,
sanctuaries have been set up in many parts of Africa.
One of the largest of these is Ngamba Island
on the Ugandan side of Lake Victoria.
These are all orphan chimpanzees who were born in the forest
Most of their mothers were shot and eaten.
Two of these chimps were rescued from a meat market,
where they were on sale,
beside the butchered corpses of their mothers.
This youngster was found starving,
chained to a tree outside a hut in a village.
If these chimpanzees could speak, what do you think they would say?
Once you take chimpanzees out of the wild,
they can never be returned.
Silly girl, Silly girl.
They're our responsibility now, for the rest of their lives.
Jane's conservation efforts today go well beyond chimpanzees.
She has also founded Roots & Shoots,
an environmental movement that helps children
make a difference in the world around them.
Ther are now Roots & Shoots clubs in nearly a hundred countries.
Dr. Jane as she is affectionately known,
believes that young people equipped with the right knowledge
can show us a better way to live in harmony with the natural world.
So wherever I go in the world, I take the sound of the chimpanzee...
jane Goodall's life has taken her down a long road
that few would have been brave enough to follow.
It has been an extraordinary journey for the young Englishwoman
who showed up on the shores of Gombe
to study an animal she'd never laid eyes on before.
- Yeah, these are... - they're pictures. The old days.
Old days in the forest
I don't have anything.
Sometimes when I sit here, I feel like a young girl again...
Go back to your mother.
...exactly the same as I did that day
when Fifi first reached out to touch me on the nose.
I've often wondered what they think about this pale-faced ape
who's lived among them for so long.
If I could have just one wish,
it would be to look out at the world through their eyes,
to see what they see, to feel what they feel...
...even if only for a moment