The Power of Jubilee

Sometime in the 1930s, a father in London gave his daughter, instead of the usual teddy bear, a stuffed chimpanzee named Jubilee. According to the young girl, her mother’s friends were “horrified by this toy, thinking it would frighten” her and give her “nightmares.”

That father was Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall and his daughter’s name is Jane.

Fast forward nearly a hundred years and you might know Jane as the foremost expert on chimpanzees. Jane Goodall turned Jubilee dreams into a revolution of the understanding of primates, including ourselves.

In 1957, Goodall traveled to a friend’s farm in the Kenyan Highlands. She contacted Louis Leakey, the Kenyan archaeologist and paleontologist, whose work was important in demonstrating that humans evolved in Africa, with the idea of simply discussing animals with the towering scientist. Leakey happened to be looking for a researcher to study chimpanzees, as he figured analyzing living apes might provide insights into ancient hominids. Leakey and his equally famous paleoanthropologist wife, Mary, decided to send Goodall to Olduvai Gorge in what is now Tanzania to begin studies.

By 1960, Goodall and her mother, whom Jane credits with the encouragement to pursue primatology, landed in Gombe Stream National Park. At the time, women were widely discouraged from entering scientific pursuits. Unlike most scientific fields, today the field of primatology is nearly evenly split between men and women, in no small part thanks to the effort of Goodall, who has since encouraged many young women to pursue the study. The power and influence of a single individual can have a wide-ranging effect.

In 1962, Leakey arranged funding for Goodall to attend Cambridge to obtain a doctorate in ethology. Previously, she had no degree. She became just the eighth person to study at Cambridge without a prior degree. She completed her thesis – Behaviour of free-living chimpanzees – in 1965. The paper detailed the first five years of her life in Gombe Stream National Park.

Goodall’s field research changed the way we view chimpanzees and, by extension, other animals. She employed radical ideas for studying them, which included naming the animals she studied and attempting to find inclusion within a colony.

She gave the animals fantastic names: David Greybeard; Goliath; Mike; Humphrey; Gigi; Mr. McGregor; Flo; Figan; Faben; Freud; Fifi; Flint; Frodo.

She observed them to have unique personalities, which was a highly unpopular idea at the time. She once stated, “it isn’t only human beings who have personality, who are capable of rational thought [and] emotions like joy and sorrow.” Goodall witnessed actions such as hugs, kisses, and tickling. At the time, those behaviors were thought only to exist within human beings. It seems absurd to me, living and interacting with animals throughout my life and noting the unique personalities of animals, that we were self-centered enough to view other living beings as not having these traits. And so recently to boot.

One of the biggest contributions to the field was her discovery that chimpanzees use tools. She watched them handle leaves to dip into termite mounds, bringing out a lollipop of insects. The chimps could also take twigs and strip the leaves to make the sticks more effective in fishing for termites. This behavior displays “object modification,” which is a step in the process of toolmaking. The prevailing theory of the day was only humans could construct and utilize tools.

Responding to Goodall’s discovery, Leakey wrote: “We must now redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human!”

The practice at the time in monitoring animals was to assign numbers to the subjects. As we noted above, Goodall bucked the trend and gave the chimps names. She allowed herself to develop bonds with them, another unpopular move. Her method hit the jackpot when she was accepted into a chimpanzee society for 22 months. She was the lowest-ranking member of the troop. To this day, she is the only human being ever to have been accepted into a chimpanzee group.

In 1977, she established the Jane Goodall Institute, which supports research in Gombe Stream National Park. Since the 1980s, she has traveled the globe to promote conservation and activism. Today, at the age of 90, she spends nearly 300 days a year devoted to those tasks. Few humans can match her impact on conservation and how we view animals.

Jane Goodall is a nonagenarian legend. She revolutionized a field of science. She blazed trails for women. She dedicated most of her life to helping our planet. She has accomplished so much It’s easy to forget how it all started, as a young girl receiving a stuffed chimpanzee named Jubilee.

To this day, Jubilee still sits on Goodall’s dresser in her London home.