ANIMAL INSTINCT
Vintage footage of Jane Goodall reveals her early scientific gift
SOME people stress about introducing a new significant other to their loved ones. Legendary primatologist Jane Goodall, 83, recalls the hazards of her future husband meeting the tribe of chimpanzees she was studying in the 1960s in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park.
“The chimps would accept me, and run away from strangers,” says Goodall, “though, luckily, Hugo was not big and tall and threatening. He spoke quietly.”
Hugo van Lawick, a National Geographic cameraman, and Goodall weren’t involved yet; he had been assigned to document this young woman living among the apes. His recently discovered archival footage of Goodall’s early days with the primates is the subject of the documentary “Jane,” from director Brett Morgen (“Cobain: Montage of Heck”), opening Friday.
The then-26-year-old Goodall had been sent by her boss, paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, to do the first extensive study of wild chimpanzees. She had no scientific background, as she’d been unable to afford college. But Leakey wanted an unbiased observer, and Goodall, who worked as his secretary, had the qualities he was looking for: She loved animals, and was incredibly patient (the latter quality being essential for spending months on end waiting for chimps to let you approach them).
“I thought, ‘The chimps are going to be scared of Hugo,’ so I built these little stands out of palm fronds for him,” says Goodall. “They would come through, and I’d be sitting outside, and he’d be in his little stand, filming.”
Gradually, the apes warmed to van Lawick’s presence. “I remember a chimp coming up behind him and stealing his camera bag,” she says, with a laugh. Goodall warmed to van Lawick, too: The couple eventually married and had a son, though they would later divorce when their careers diverged.
She spent decades in the wild studying chimpanzees, becoming the world’s expert on them. In the early days, she was the first to observe one using a tool — a blade of grass used to collect termites — which upended the scientific community’s belief that humans were the only species to use tools. These days, she travels the world advocating for conservancy — and, occasionally, consulting for Hollywood. She was an adviser on chimp behavior in this year’s “War for the Planet of the Apes,” which she calls “a very powerful story.”
Warfare, she discovered back in the ’60s, is also not unique to humans: at one point in “Jane,” her chimp tribe fights another tribe.
“It made them seem more like us than I knew before,” she says. “I thought they were nicer than we are, but it turns out they can be violent and brutal as well. But I don’t believe they are capable of evil. That’s only us.”