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Chapter 1: What is the significance of Jane Goodall's research on chimpanzees?
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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. World-renowned primatologist, conservationist, and humanitarian Jane Goodall died yesterday at the age of 91. Dubbed the woman who redefined man, Jane changed our perceptions of primates, people, and the connection between the two.
And while she didn't exactly find the missing link, she came closer than just about anyone else on Earth. Her extensive research into the behavior of chimpanzees, which started in Africa in the 1960s and continued until her death, fundamentally altered scientific thinking around the relationship between humans and other mammals and helped us rethink what it means to live on this planet.
Jane gave multiple TED Talks over the years, and in honor of her expansive life and work, we are sharing her first TED Talk from 2003 with you all today. She reflects on her decades of work with chimpanzees and what they've taught her about humanity, the environment, and what our future could hold.
First of all, it's been fantastic being here over these past few days. And secondly, I feel it's a great honor to kind of wind up this extraordinary gathering of people and these amazing talks that we've had. I feel that I've fitted in in many ways to some of the things that I've heard. I started off just, I came directly here from the deep, deep tropical rainforest in Ecuador, where I was out.
you could only get there by a plane, with indigenous people with paint on their faces and parrot feathers on their headdresses, where these people are fighting to try and keep the oil companies and keep the roads out of their forests. They're fighting to develop their own way of living within the forest in a world that's clean, a world that isn't contaminated, a world that isn't polluted.
And what was so amazing to me and what fits right in with what we're all talking about here at TED is that there, right in the middle of this rainforest, was some solar panels, the first in that part of Ecuador. And that was mainly to bring water up by pump so that the women wouldn't have to go down. The water was cleaned, but because they got a lot of batteries, they were able to store
a lot of electricity. So every house, and there were I think eight houses in this little community, could have light for I think it was about half an hour each evening. And there is the chief in all his regal finery with a laptop computer. And this man, he has been outside, but he's gone back. And he was saying, you know, we have suddenly jumped into a whole new era.
And we didn't even know about the white man 50 years ago. Now here we are with laptop computers. computers. And there are some things we want to learn from the modern world. We want to know about health care. We want to know about what other people do. We're interested in it. And we want to learn other languages. We want to know English and French and perhaps Chinese. And we're good at languages.
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Chapter 2: How did Jane Goodall redefine our understanding of tool use in animals?
The reason this was so exciting and such a breakthrough is at that time, it was thought that humans and only humans used and made tools. When I was at school, we were defined as man, the tool maker. So that when Louis Leakey, my mentor, heard this news, he said, ah, we must now redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as humans.
We now know that at Gombe alone, there are nine different ways in which chimpanzees use different objects for different purposes. Moreover, we know that in different parts of Africa, wherever chimps have been studied, there are completely different tool-using behaviors.
And because it seems that these patterns are passed from one generation to the next through observation, imitation, and practice, that is a definition of human culture.
What we find is that over these 40-odd years that I and others have been studying chimpanzees and the other great apes, and as I say, other mammals with complex brains and social systems, we have found that after all, there isn't a sharp line dividing humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. It's a very wuzzy line.
It's getting wuzzier all the time as we find animals doing things that we, in our arrogance, used to think was just human. The chimps, there's no time to discuss their fascinating lives, but they have this long childhood, five years of suckling and sleeping with the mother, and then another three, four or five years of emotional dependence on her even when the next child is born.
The importance of learning in that time when behavior is flexible and there's an awful lot to learn in chimpanzee society. the long-term affectionate supportive bonds that develop throughout this long childhood with the mother, with the brothers and sisters, and which can last through a lifetime which may be up to 60 years.
They can actually live longer than 60 in captivity, so we've only done 40 years in the wild so far. We find chimps are capable of true compassion and altruism. We find in their non-verbal communication, this is very rich, they have a lot of sounds which they use in different circumstances, but they also use touch, posture, gesture. And what do they do?
They kiss, they embrace, they hold hands, they pat one another on the back, they swagger, they shake their fist. The kind of things that we do and they do them in the same kind of context. They have very sophisticated cooperation. Sometimes they hunt, not that often, but when they hunt they show sophisticated cooperation and they share the prey. We find that
They show emotions similar to, maybe sometimes the same, as those that we describe in ourselves as happiness, sadness, fear, despair.
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