Although she did not recognize it at the time, her detailed field notes would later show that this produced a split in the Chimp band that would later be fatal for many of them. Three years earlier, the alpha male leader of one of the troops at Gombe, who Goodall had named Leakey, died.

There were accusations that she was allowing anthropomorphism and emotional involvement with her study subjects to cloud and influence her scientific judgement. She (and others) came to view the Chimps as hairy little people, a sort of hippie band that lived peacefully in harmony with Mother Nature–in contrast to the destructive and warlike humans. Much of what we know today about Chimpanzees in the wild comes from Jane Goodall and her work.īut Goodall also faced some criticism. Once thought to be strictly vegetarian, the Chimps were discovered to form organized hunting parties that would carefully stalk and kill Colobus Monkeys as food, sharing the highly-prized meat among the members of the hunting party. The chimps were able to make and use tools (an area formerly thought to be exclusively human), including stone hammers for nut-cracking, stripped twigs for “termite fishing”, and sharpened wooden spears for hunting bushbabies–and these formed local “cultures”, with each troop passing its own knowledge base from generation to generation. They had a thorough knowledge of their natural surroundings and were able to utilize them intelligently–they were even able to select plants with medicinal properties when they needed them. The Chimps, our closest genetic relatives, were uncannily like humans: they formed tightly-knit social groups and complex political structures that were based on alliances and partnerships. Over the next five decades, Jane Goodall uncovered much about Chimpanzees that had not been known before. It became one of the most remarkable longterm scientific studies ever undertaken. So he assigned three students to the task: one was sent to Borneo to study Orang-utans, another was sent to Rwanda to study Gorillas, and a third, Jane Goodall, was sent to Gombe Forest in Tanzania to study Chimpanzees. That changed when Dr Louis Leakey, a prominent paleontologist in Africa, decided that one way to learn more about the possible social structures of early humans ancestors was to study our closest living relatives. Until the 1960’s, there had been little effort to study the great apes in the wild. In the end, the northern group systematically eliminated the southern group, killing nearly all of them–even the children–and kidnapping the survivors.īut the unique factor in this war was that all of the participants were Chimpanzees. After the death of a local leader, two rival factions were formed which engaged in classic guerrilla warfare. Between 19, a tribal war raged in Tanzania.

Chimpanzee war party