LIVING WITH THE CHIMPANZEES

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32775, 27 November 1971, Page 10

LIVING WITH THE CHIMPANZEES

(Reviewed by J.V.A.) In The Shadow Of Man. By Jane van Lawick-Goodall. Collins. 256 pp. Jane van Lawick-Goodall is a remarkable young woman who has made a widely-acclaimed contribution to international scientific research. She has already published two books in collaboration with her photographer husband, one on a study of wild dogs, jackals and hyenas, and one on their own little son’s adventures in the African bush. Now comes her own story of the work which made her name. “In The Shadow of Man” tells of her observations of chimpanzee life in the wild in a Game Reserve in Tanzania and of its importance to current scientific research and theory. As well as being a fearless, enterprising, persistent and skilled observer of animal behaviour, Jane van LawickGoodall is also a natural story-teller. Her fascinating experiences of living amongst chimpanzees in an equatorial forest are related in colourful detail and one can only admire her coolness and detachment and her sense of purpose in perilous and physically distressing conditions. Few young women would willingly turn their backs on a secure and stimulating job and work hard as a waitress to earn enough money to get to Africa to be near wild animals. There the author was offered a job as secretary/assistant to Dr L. S. B. Leakey, and soon found herself helping with excavations in the Olduvai Gorge where important relics of prehistoric man have since been discovered.

To Dr Leakey, it seems, she was a person he had been searching for for 20 years—someone so completely fascinated by animals and their behaviour that they could forgo the amenities of civilisation for long periods of time without any difficulty. He . asked her if she was prepared to go and live in a tent on the shores of Lake Tanganyika and study a group of chimpanzees living there in a rugged and mountainous habitat. He was particularly interested in them because the remains of early man were often found on a lake shore and an understanding of chimpanzee behaviour might shed light on the behaviour of stone-age men. Jane’s lack of university training was considered to be an advantage rather than a handicap for Dr Leakey wanted someone with a mind uncluttered and unbiased by theory who would make the study for no other reason than a real desire tor knowledge, someone with a sympathetic understanding of animals. She was wholehearted and enthusiastic in her acceptance. A sponsor was found, the authorities’ permission was gained and Jane, with her mother as chaperone, established a camp site in the Gombe Stream Game Reserve. For three months she roamed around with an African game scout and a bearer, learning bush lore and how to find her way through seemingly impenetrable forest, but the few chimpanzees seen ran away in fright. It was not until Jane managed to get away on her own that the chimpanzees slowly learned to accept her presence and became less and less afraid. She notes how piece by piece she began to form her first somewhat crude picture of chimpanzee life. During her first trial six-month period Jane van Lawick-Goodall made two exciting discoveries —she observed chimpanzees eating meat, previously scientists had suspected that they were primarily vegetarians and fruit eaters; and she saw an example of crude toolmaking with chimpanzees using a grass stem as a tool to eat from a termite’s nest. There were plenty of setbacks too—a bout of malaria, tsetse-fly bites and encounters with a leopard, poisonous snakes, a hippopotamus and buffalo,

but she was able to take them all in her stride.

She confesses that when her mother had to return to England, leaving her with her African helpers, she felt very alone and the onset of the rainy season brought new problems. When she had been working full time at Gombe Stream for an uninterrupted stretch of 18 months her sister arrived to visit Jane and take photographs and was horrified at her emaciated appearance. Shortly afterwards they both left for England where Jane was to spend six months “exile” working for her Ph.D. in ethology at Cambridge University. To her relief on arriving back at Gombe, the chimpanzees seemed if anything more tolerant of her than before.

One day a large male chimpanzee walked into her camp site. At first his visits were irregular and unpredictable but Jane and her staff encouraged him with bananas and soon an elaborate feeding station had to be set up for a large community of visiting chimpanzees.

Gradually Jane learned to identify them all individually. She gave them all names and built up detailed notes on their history and behaviour. There was David Greybeard, the splendid fullygrown male who became so friendly that he allowed her to groom him. There was the all-powerful Mike, at the head of the social hierarchy; old Flo, an endearing mother with children ranging from the fine adolescent male Faben to the new baby daughter Flame; and there was Oily, the shy

Political history Europe’s Would-be Polity. By L. N. Lindberg and S. A. Scheingold. 310 pp. Index. Cold War and Co-existence. By W. E. Griffith. 108 pp. Index. Both published by Prentice Hall.

Books and articles on European integration have proliferated in the last 10 years. The joint authors of “Europe’s Would-be Polity” justify their contribution of yet another academic text-book on the subject by a claim that they have “chosen to focus on the question: once an enterprise like the European Community is launched, what accounts for its subsequent growth, stabilisation, or decline?”

The question must be of increasing moment to Europeans, and even to New Zealanders; but this book, couched in the curious sociological jargon which passes for profundity in the United States, adds little to what has already been said on the Community. From the outset the authors admit the importance of unique, particular and unforseen events and personalities which do not fit easily into their “model.” When they are describing what has already happened in Western Europe they are clear enough; when they begin to predict they are less useful than much of the sober debate on the future of Europe which appears almost daily in the best newspapers of Germany, France and Britain.

"Cold War and Co-existence,” like "Europe’s Would-be Polity,” hardly stands out from the flood of expensive, paper-covered, academic text-books emanating from the United States. Dr Griffith is an acknowledged authority on Sino-Soviet relations and relations between East and West; he has compressed into a hundred pages a history qf Cold War politics from 1945 to the present. There is little that is new but much that deserves recalling, not least the parallels between the imperial designs of Tsarist Russia and the expansionist tendency of the Soviet Union.

nervous young matron and Merlin, the neurotic orphan. There are some endearing little cameos—Flo tickling her new baby chimp to make him smile, the baby Flint learning to walk, Mike borrowing the camp paraffin tins to frighten the rest of the troop into submission, the strange friendship between Gilka and a young baboon and the tragedy of an outbreak of poliomyelitis. In 1962 Jane gave permission to her sponsors, the National Geographic Society, to send a professional photographer to visit the Reserve. Hugo van Lawick was not only an excellent photographer but had a real love of animals and an understanding of them. Jane found in him a kindred spirit and they were married after her third term at Cambridge University and now work together. Hugo soon became immersed in the goings-on of the chimpanzee group and commented that it was like being spectators of life in some little village endless fascination, endless enjoyment and endless work. Soon, their work needed a research assistant and a secretary; permanent buildings were erected and the Gombe Stream Research Centre was established. Today it comprises a large collection of buildings to house a team of research workers from many parts of the world. Plans are going ahead to build a new feeding station where tourists and visitors will have the opportunity to observe the chimpanzees in all the splendour of their freedom. Jane considers that the chimpanzee is a creature of immense significance to the understanding of man, and her ultimate goal is to use the knowledge of chimpanzee behaviour to benefit humanity. One of the most striking ways in which the chimpanzee resembles man is in the structure of his brain. Observations at Gombe have highlighted similarities in the behaviour of chimpanzee and man, notably in nonverbal communication patterns. Human aggression is a vital problem and studies of chimpanzee aggression in progress at Gombe may prove of immense significance. The methods by which we raise our children and the welfare of orphans and sociallydeprived youngsters are also problems of major concern. Studies at Gombe on different mothering techniques and the behaviour of abnormal youngsters have already proved of interest to child psychologists and psychiatrists. Understanding of human adolescence and mental illness may also be helped.

Jane accepts that chimpanzees are needed in captivity to serve as experimental models for brain and other disorders and that this assists science in its fight to alleviate human suffering. But she makes a plea that laboratory chimps should be provided with more humane conditions. She also appeals for the conservation of chimpanzees in thp wild. Their lives are not only threatened by hunters who prize their flesh as a delicacy and their young for sale for research, but also the spread of agriculture and forestry threatens their habitat. It would be tragic if future generations were to grow up to find the chimpanzee exists only in the zoo and the laboratory.

The text is accompanied by appendices on facia! expressions and calls, diet, weapon and tool use and some milestones in the development of chimpanzees, also an index. And of course there are Hugo van Lawick’s superb photographs. The coloured pictures are really magnificent and the black and white shots, ranging from close up character studies to incredible action pictures, only add to his already considerable reputation as a wildlife photographer. This is a really outstanding book and is sure to appeal to a very wide section of the reading public.