Almost
every day since July 1960 someone has been watching the chimpanzees in what is
now Gombe National Park in Tanzania, making careful notes of their every action
from dawn to dusk.
Begun by Jane Goodall and carried forward by generations of the world's leading
primatologists, this irreplaceable collection of data from 50 years of
uninterrupted study is now being curated and digitized by researchers at Duke
University so that it can become even more useful to science.
Duke has established a new
research center to house and manage the archive, which is owned by the Jane Goodall Institute of
Arlington, Va. Anne Pusey, chair of evolutionary anthropology at the
university, will run the project, which will be known as the Jane Goodall
Institute Research Center.
"Jane Goodall's contribution to primate studies simply cannot be
overstated," said Pusey, who began working with Goodall in Africa in 1970.
"She helped establish a new way of studying animals in the wild, and
inspired countless others to follow in her footsteps. We're delighted to have
Dr. Goodall visiting us to see what we're doing with her data, and to meet with
the students and faculty who are making the work she started even more valuable."
At 26, Goodall arrived at Gombe
Stream on the east shore of Lake Tanganyika to observe one of humankind's
closest relatives in the wild. She had little training and no fixed
methodology, but she was blessed with a keen eye for observation and endless
patience. At first from a distance and then close up, she took meticulous notes
of everything she observed chimpanzees doing.
"At 2:00 Flint suckled from the right breast - 2
mins. paused for half a min and then he suckled for another 1 1 / 2 mins. same
breast. He then sucked his own thumb."
To build rapport with the
chimpanzees and be able to observe them closely for longer periods, Goodall
used bananas at a feeding station, a practice which has since been
discontinued. Longhand notes gave way to audio transcriptions, typed each night
on carbon paper copies. Narrative became grids of abbreviated data called
"check-sheets."
Students and Tanzanian field staff
joined the data collection. As the chimpanzees became more accustomed to these
strange apes, their human observers were able to track them into the steep and
tangled terrain surrounding the camp.
"7:08 ... FD raise a hand and shake branch calling SA,
SA follow quickly and present her genitals to FD who mates her with copulation
sounds. FD finish and then continue to feed."
Simply by watching carefully,
Goodall revolutionized our understanding of chimpanzees: They make and use
tools. They mate promiscuously, but have lifelong bonds with their mothers.
They laugh and play. They have shifting political alliances and wage violent
battles over territory. They hunt monkeys and bush pigs in organized groups and
eat their meat.
"15:31 ... KS follows a female colubus (monkey) who was carrying a baby monkey on tummy.
Grabs the baby and takes it in the bushes and feeds on the colubus. Other
chimps continue to hunt."
"If you really want to
understand how the minds of animals work, you have to go out and see how they
behave in their natural environment," said Brian Hare, an assistant
professor of evolutionary anthropology and director of the Hominoid Psychology
Research Group at Duke. "(Goodall) challenged us to think about how their
minds work in the real world. That's the major contribution Jane made."
All of these data, narratives in
English and Swahili, check-sheets, hand-drawn maps, video tape and photographs,
are being studied and digitized in a suite of rooms at Duke that houses more
than 20 file cabinets full of documents dating back to Goodall's first
observations. The collection continues to receive new data from the study at
Gombe on a regular basis in paper and digital forms.
The Gombe archive is priceless for
several reasons. First and foremost, it is only by watching a long-lived
species for entire lifetimes that we can see the larger patterns created by social
bonds and family relationships, said Duke biologist Susan Alberts, who has been
studying baboons in Kenya for nearly 30 years.
And while each day of tracking
data by itself may not add up to much, there are rare events and subtle
patterns in the day-to-day events that can only be discerned by taking the long
view, Pusey said.
"Just by watching animals
over time you can learn so much," said Anne Yoder, director of the Duke
Lemur Center, which has a 40-year database of captive lemurs. "That
informs your questions, so that the questions that you ask are really powerful.
And the more you know, the more powerful the questions are."
The archive of Gombe data will be
used to form new questions about chimpanzees and other primates, said Pusey,
who recently co-authored a paper with Alberts examining the aging process
across all primate species using long-term data from Gombe and other field
studies.
"The longer-term
picture you have, the richer your understanding of these animals could
be," Alberts said. "We have barely touched the tip of the
iceberg."