"A young woman sits barefoot on the ground, reaching out her hand to a chimpanzee, who sits about a yard away. And he lightly, seemingly shyly, takes her human fingers into his own. A bright, red palm nut has dropped on the soil between them. The woman in the sculpture is the great primatologist and conservationist Jane Goodall, at the moment she first earned the trust of a wild chimp."
"She met him when she was in her 20s, a former secretary from Bournemouth, England, who saved cash tips she'd earned as a waitress to journey to Africa, where she talked herself into a job as assistant to the famed anthropologist Louis Leakey. She had no college experience. But Jane Goodall convinced Leakey she would be just the person to live among and study a group of chimpanzees he had discovered on the shores of Lake Tanganyika."
"And on what she recalled was a rainy morning, November 4, 1960, she saw David Greybeard and other chimps take twigs from a tree, pluck their leaves, and use them as sticks to pierce a termite mound and slurp the insects off the end almost like how those primates called human beings might lick peanut butter off a spoon. What she saw and documented was startling: the chimps had made the twigs into tools."
A bronze sculpture outside the Field Museum in Chicago shows Jane Goodall reaching toward a chimpanzee that gently takes and squeezes her fingers after a red palm nut falls between them. Jane Goodall met the chimp David Greybeard in her twenties after traveling to Africa and securing work with Louis Leakey despite having no college background. On November 4, 1960, she observed chimpanzees fashion twigs into tools to extract termites, documenting tool use among primates. Louis Leakey argued humans and tools required redefinition. Jane Goodall became a celebrated primatologist and conservationist and died at 91.
Read at www.npr.org
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]