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I grew up in England and have always loved watching animals
and exploring wild places. I watched every nature program and
dreamed about Africa. I finished my undergraduate degree in
zoology at Oxford University in 1970, then I had the extraordinary
opportunity to go to Gombe to work for Jane Goodall as a research
assistant, studying mother-infant relations in chimpanzees.
I soon got hooked on living in Gombe, and fascinated by how
young chimpanzees made the passage from childhood through adolescence.
I continued my studies on adolescence for a Ph.D at Stanford.
After this I switched species for a while, making a brief study
of Japanese snow monkeys in Japan before going on to the Serengeti
to study lions. I lived with my husband, and later my two kids,
for several years in the Serengeti before starting a permanent
job as Professor of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior at the University
of Minnesota. Once my children started school I no longer traveled
to Africa, but spent my time analyzing our data on lions, writing
papers and teaching. I kept in touch with Jane Goodall and the
news from Gombe over all these years, and in the early 1990s,
I asked if I could look at some of the recent data on the chimpanzees
to follow up some of my research questions. The eventual outcome
was that we decided to bring all the Gombe data from Jane's
house in Dar es Salaam to Minnesota for safekeeping and to provide
access to computer analysis.
I love poring over the notes, crunching data in the computer
and pulling out information that allows us to see new patterns
in chimpanzee behavior. For example, we had to look at 20 years
of data to discover how important female dominance rank is in
determining female reproductive success. Nobody realized this
before, and our findings open up many new questions about how
young chimps achieve high dominance rank.
I am very fortunate in being able to work with a wonderful,
talented research team at Minnesota. It is exciting to see new
graduate students falling in love with Gombe and the chimps
and making their own new discoveries. I also visit Gombe as
often as I can. When I returned for the first time in 1996,
it was fascinating to see my previous young study subjects grown
up with their own babies. Some of the new youngsters bore uncanny
resemblances to their mothers or to males that I had studied
at the same age. In one case we have found from DNA analysis
that two males are father and son, as I had suspected.
It is an awesome responsibility to be the custodian of the data
on the Gombe chimps. There is so much still to discover from
the information already collected, as well as from new data
to come. We hope that the Gombe chimps will continue to survive
and prosper forever, but sadly they are living in a small isolated
island of forest and are subject to the dangers of human disease
and potential inbreeding. I hope that our work at the Center
will continue to contribute to Jane Goodall's remarkable achievements
in making the public aware of the complex behavior of chimpanzees
so that everyone will help in the vital work of preserving them.
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