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Jane and the Chimps
Jane and the Chimps

Warm-Up
Warm-Up
Jane Goodall’s childhood dream was to go to the African continent and watch wild animals
in their native habitat. In 1956, she got the opportunity to travel to Kenya where she met
the famous anthropologist and palaeontologist, Dr Louis S.B. Leakey and in 1960, Leakey and
Jane began an important study of wild chimpanzees by Lake Tanganyika in the Gombe Stream
Chimpanzee Reserve. She spent many years observing the behaviour of Chimpanzees. These
observations have influenced the scientists in studying how humans developed from apes. In
1977, Jane set up the Jane Goodall Institute with a view to protect Chimpanzees.

I had a wonderful supportive mother. She encouraged me to follow my ridiculous dream to go to
Africa and live with animals. Everyone else laughed at me, but she said, “Jane, if you really want
something, you work hard, take advantage of opportunity, and never give up. You will find a way.”

“I was fortunate enough to meet the late Louis Leakey, the famous
palaeontologist, who gave me this amazing chance to go and
try to find out about the Wild Chimpanzees, our closest living
relatives in the animal world.”

That study began in the 1960s and is now in its forty-third year.
When I go back there, I see some chimpanzees that I knew then,
and one of them is Fifi. She was a little baby when I arrived
in 1960 and she is about forty-three years old now; she’s the
matriarch of her community and has had several children.”

“When I go there and I look into her eyes, this grand old lady, I think, “This is my oldest chimpanzee
friend, and she and I share certain memories of those early 60s that no other being in the world
shares because they are not there any more.” And when I look into those eyes, I know I am looking
into the eyes of a thinking, feeling being. But I will never know what she thinks about me. It is always

a mystery, there is always something to learn. We have not finished learning about this one amazing
population of chimpanzees. When I first went to Cambridge University to get my PhD, professors and
fellow-students were busy studying animal behaviour in the laboratory, doing some rather unpleasant
experiments with animals to ‘find out how they worked’. I was told, first of all, that I should not have
named the chimpanzees, I should have given them numbers; it was more scientific. I could not

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