But otherwise, the study has really gone on very much the same.” On inspiring the next generation of conservationists But you know, the only thing really different today is that we no longer have the banana feeding, we no longer have any interaction with the chimpanzees. And then we graduated to filling a lot of the stuff in on check sheets and tape recorders. “When I began, it was a notebook and pen - or pencil in the wet season - and typing it up at night, so that they were very long days. You know, you can't share your life in a meaningful way with a dog, a cat, a bird or a cow, I don't care what, and not know of course we're not the only beings with personalities, minds and emotions.” On how the study of chimpanzees has changed since she began her fieldwork “But fortunately, though I was really intimidated by these clever, clever professors at Cambridge, I’d had this wonderful teacher when I was a child who taught me that in this respect, they were wrong - and that was my dog. because he insisted, I was told I couldn't talk about chimpanzees having personalities, minds capable of thinking, and certainly not emotions - you know, I was guilty of anthropomorphism. And you know, I completely agree with him. And Lewis Leakey deliberately chose me because he said he wanted somebody whose mind was uncluttered by the - in his opinion -sometimes not good scientific thinking. That was, you know, the luck - I was sort of out there first. “First of all, there was nobody who could have trained me because nobody had done it before. So finding out that chimpanzee offspring who have had a supportive mother have tended to do better, be better mothers, rise higher in the hierarchy if they’re males - it just stresses the importance of the first couple of years of life and the kind of upbringing that you have.” On her best teachers She supported my dream of going to Africa when everybody else laughed at me. And of course, that's what I attribute so much of my own success to: The way Mom brought me up, my mother. She was affectionate, protective but not overprotective, and above all, supportive. And Flo is just the perfect example of the very best kind of mother. “Over the years, I've learned there are good mothers and not good mothers there’s very few bad mothers - just one or two we've known. That's how it felt.” On what chimpanzees taught her about motherhood - particularly one chimp mother named Flo And the first time he actually approached and took a banana from my hand, it was like the stories you read about people approaching uncontacted human tribes. Eventually, began coming fairly regularly and so I stayed down, got to know him better. “I was still going into the hills every single day, into the forest. So then I asked the cook, Dominic, to put bananas out. And he came into my camp and pinched some bananas. I mean, it was when the one chimp who began to lose his fear first. I called him David Greybeard because he has a beautiful white beard - I'm not quite sure why David Greybeard, but anyway, that came to be his name. On what it felt like to make contact with the Gombe chimpanzees for the first time Highlights from their conversation are below, and you can listen to the full interview using the audio player. Goodall spoke with Science Friday about at length about the film, her fieldwork, encouraging the next generation of conservationists and even why she believes in Bigfoot. “The magic of being able to interact with creatures who'd been running away from you for almost a year was something real special, and that comes out very strongly in this film.” “Back then, it was a very naïve, innocent sort of world,” Goodall says. Now a new documentary, “ JANE,” reconstructs Goodall’s time in the Gombe forest, drawing on a trove of recently discovered archival footage. Jane Goodall first traveled to Gombe, Tanzania, as an amateur scientist and began amassing observations that would change the way we understand chimpanzees and even humans.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |