Jane Goodall: In the Shadow of Man (Collins Sons and Co. 1971)
In memory of Jane Goodall, I would like to recommend one of her books.
Jane Goodall was born in London in 1934. For her second birthday, her father gave her a stuffed chimpanzee. Several of the family’s friends were afraid that the child would have nightmares from it, but Jane kept the toy for the rest of her life. She loved animals from an early age and, after finishing high school and a secretarial course, she began working for the archaeologist-anthropologist Louis Leakey in Kenya. He suggested that archaeological finds could be better interpreted by observing the behavior of modern great apes. This is how Jane Goodall began observing chimpanzees near the Gombe stream. (Interestingly, it was at Leakey’s encouragement that Diane Fossey – observing mountain gorillas – and Birute Galdikas – observing orangutans in Borneo – also began their research.)
In the Shadow of Man was first published in 1971 and presents Jane Goodall’s most significant work. Before that, great apes had only been studied in experimental settings and solely in order to draw conclusions that could be transferred to the human psyche. Jane Goodall and her research team observed a single troop of chimpanzees over the course of a few years, so they could map out the relationships between the individuals, their behavior, and their use of tools. Jane Goodall was the first to not give numbers to the individuals, but to name them. This makes her books particularly readable. However, In the Shadow of Man is not only an enjoyable book, but also unique in a scientific sense, and the author earned her doctorate in Cambridge with this work.
The book conveys the respect and love that Jane Goodall felt for nature. She always liked to feel like she was part of nature. She accepted the changing of wet and dry seasons and saw the good in them all. When she first stepped onto the banks of the Gombe Stream, she never dreamed that she would one day establish a research center here. By her own admission, they were driven to continue observing chimpanzees for reasons similar to those that keep us from putting down an exciting novel until we reach the end. Throughout her life, Jane Goodall was an environmental activist who devoted her life to studying the effects of climate change and informing people about it.
