12/15/2023 0 Comments Jane goodall chimpanzee diseasesWhat have been your most significant contributions?īreaking down this perceived sharp line between us and other creatures. With grant money we received from the Royal Norwegian Embassy of Tanzania this year, we are helping communities to participate in REDD by, among other things, working with Google Earth Outreach to train local people to use the Android smartphone and other technologies to collect carbon data and monitor their forests. We have no idea if the animals will use these corridors, but at least we’re giving them the option.Īnother development is the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) initiative, a funding mechanism that could direct money from carbon trading to communities that can prove they are protecting their forests. We have the beginnings of corridors moving out to other tropical forests with small groups of chimps in them. Gombe is very tiny, but it now has a buffer of green growing all the way around the park where once there were bare hills. They understand the importance of conserving water by not cutting the trees down. In Tanzania the Jane Goodall Institute started a program called TACARE (“Take Care”), which is improving the lives of the local villagers by helping to alleviate poverty, so they now want to support our efforts to protect the forest. What is being done now to protect chimps? Chimpanzees can also catch many of our infectious diseases, so as logging companies make roads deeper into the forest, the animals are more at risk. In the Congo Basin, where the main chimp populations exist, the illegal commercial bushmeat trade is another threat, and that’s pretty grim. The main threats vary from place to place, but in most locations the biggest problem is the loss of their forests. My own feeling is that the evolution of our intellect quickened once we began using the kind of language we use today, a language that enables us to discuss the past and to plan the distant future. You can have very bright chimps that can learn sign language and do all kinds of things with computers, but it doesn’t make sense to compare that intellect with even that of a normal human, let alone an Einstein. What sets the human mind apart from the chimp mind? Perhaps even more shocking are the attacks on newborn babies by females in the same community. Communities will engage in a sort of primitive warfare that appears to be over territory. What came as a shock to me is that, like us, they have a very dark side, and they’re capable of violent brutality, even war. But it was exciting to observe this behavior in the wild, along with hunting and food sharing, because it enabled us to get money to carry on with our research. That didn’t surprise me particularly, because German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler had reported that they use tools readily in captivity. Many people were really surprised by the fact that they made and used tools. The most significant thing is how incredibly like humans they are. What about their behavior most surprised you? Goodall: I was expecting chimpanzees to be highly intelligent, but as for how they lived in the wild or what their social structure was, nobody knew much about that. Scientific American: When you first arrived at Gombe, what were your preconceptions about chimpanzees? Edited excerpts from the conversation follow. Scientific American recently reached Goodall by phone in Hong Kong, where she was commemorating the 50th anniversary of the start of her work in Gombe. These days the 76-year-old Goodall works to save endangered chimps and their habitats. Through her accounts of the drama-filled lives of Fifi, David Greybeard and other chimps, she showed that these apes share many traits previously thought to be unique to humans. On July 4, 1960, 26-year-old Jane Goodall arrived at Gombe Stream Game Reserve in Tanzania to study the behavior of chimpanzees.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |