Stuff You Should KnowThere aren’t too many people walking around today who get a pass from the entire world for anything remotely negative they do or say. That’s just how the world receives Jane Goodall, and she’s earned that from a lifetime of building greater human understanding of our animal relatives.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you should know podcasts. How you doing, I'm good, I'm good.
You I'm sweepy?
Oh are you?
Yeah?
I'm a little beat myself. Is it just life or did you stay up till five am drinking?
No, it's just hitting right around the old nap time, So you know.
I'm with you. Do you ever doze off all your studying?
Uh? No, but I you know, I still try and catch a short nap every day, and on the recording days that sometimes happens. But today was I was not able to gotcha?
Well, we'll retire eventually. Hang in there.
I'll sleep when I retire.
Hey, So what do you want to talk about today?
I mean, I prepped for a show on Jane Goodall, so did I. And she's the best.
She is she is she is widely roundly, basically globally universally probably seen as essentially a great person.
Yeah, I think she's cherished and for good reason. After did you watch the documentary for this at all?
By the way, I didn't the Future one from twenty seventeen.
Jane, Yeah, yeah, no I didn't. It's great.
It sounds great. I read a lot about it, as I do, but I haven't seen it. Yeah, I'll have to watch it still.
Yeah, it's really good. Highly recommended if you're listening and if this hearing about her, you know, inspires you to learn more at all, because it's a great documentary of footage, beautiful, beautiful color film stock from back then when she was doing her studies. And it's not it's not like a narrate. It's it's narrated just by her thoughts and this beautiful score and it just shows it. It's just really really lovely the way it plays out.
That's awesome. I heard the car chase in the middle is really great.
Yeah, I didn't expect it, but very good.
So drive drive, drive. Yeah, so we're talking Jane Goodall. For those of you who don't know who Jane Goodall is, she is one of the world's foremost renowned primatologists. And she did it the old fashioned way by going out into the jungle and learning as she did. It's called the school of hard knocks, I think. Yeah, that's the thing about Jane Goodall. She had a high school education when she started. She did not go to college, not for a while, and a guy named Lewis Leakey, a famous anthropologist, took a gamble on her on purpose because he was looking for somebody who could who was not trained, purposely, not trained so that they weren't bringing a bunch of preconceptions to them to study chimpanzees. And Jing Goodall fit the bill. As we'll see, she's loved animals since she was a kid, and after just a few months started excelling at it and eventually changed how the world sees chimpanzees. We didn't know much about him before, We had a lot of assumptions about him, and Jing Goodall showed that they were just let's just turn those on their heads.
Yeah, how's that.
For an intro baby?
It's pretty good?
Thank you?
Do we I mean, do we get more specific? Even?
Oh? I thought we'd get specific as we went along, but sure, go ahead.
Yeah. So she was born in nineteen thirty four in England to her mother Margaret and her father Mortimer. Go ahead and forget I even said father Mortimer, because he was not around much and he does not feel much in her story. He divorced when Jane was but sixteen. But especially after watching this documentary, if we're going to salute Jane Goodall, we are going to have to salute her mother, because her mom was the one who was like, Hey, you want to figure something out, then go figure it out and go learn it and go do Instead of talking about something, go out and do it because no one else is going to do it unless you do it. And who cares that it's the nineteen forties and fifties. Who cares that you're a young girl. Just go out and do it, Jane, by God, and she did.
Yeah, She very famously encouraged her to go dance on the rain, feel the rain in her skin because no one else will do it for you.
That's right, And like you said, and this is what maybe set her apart from other scientists at the time. She loved, loved and loved animals like capital l O vee, and that sort of flew in the face of the dispassionate history of how you study animals.
Yeah, biologists typically approached animals totally detached, totally unemotional.
They were aware opposed to.
That was how they were trained to and it makes sense in a way because this is there was a widespread fear and there apparently still is among you know, hardcore biologists and other ologists that study animals, that we humans have a just a great propensity for anthropomorphizing animals. And how can you study animals if you're just essentially presuming that they're behaving like humans. You can't if they're doing something that's actually not human like and you're just misinterpreting it, you're being misled by your anthropomorphism. So there was a real there was The workaround that they figured out was to just look at them dispassionately. They're just animals. I don't care what their names are, I don't care anything about them. I'm just going to study them as dispassionately as possible in the hopes of preventing from anthropomorphizing. That was the predominant view, and again it still kind of is. It's complete hogwash, the idea that there's just no inner lives to animals, and apparently there's still some academics that cling on to that, but it does make a little bit of sense where if you're worried about projecting your own feelings and values and emotions and thoughts onto the animals you're studying, then just don't get attached to the animals. And that's what she entered into.
You know, he said, what they don't care what their names are.
Well, I'm sure they have names like ragnor the Conquerors. Probably a pretty regular name for a cow.
I would think so. But you're right, But she flew in the face of that. She loved animals as a child. She would just spend hours and hours and hours as a young girl drawing animals, talking about animals, writing about animals, and not just you know, birds are fun because they fly, like observing them like a little miniature scientist. So she had recollections about bringing worms to bed when she was a toddler, like one of her first memories. Another was when she went to watch a hen laying an egg and like document that whole process. Spent five hours in a hen house as a young girl, and her parents couldn't find her, and her mom, you know, called the cops. They thought she had wandered off.
Yeah, and I saw very pivotally when she was younger. I'm not sure what age, but she was a young kid. Still she was fascinated with the pigs that she saw on the English countryside, and she wanted to hang out with them, but they would always run away. So she taught herself to be super patient and to sit and get them to come closer to her and eventually feed them and won their trust that way, and that would later serve her very well when she started to study chimpanzees.
Yeah, and in fact, that patient's in the documentary you know you mentioned Lewis Leaky. He was a very famous paleontologist and anthropologist who gave her her break in the nineteen fifties when she met him in Kenya. I guess we should say she got there because she graduated from high school and was like, you know what, I'm not gonna we can't afford college. I'm gonna go get a couple of jobs, hustle save money so I can go to Africa and study on my own. But she got there, and Leaky she said part of the reason she got the job was because he wanted someone with monumental patients. I ease, somebody who would sit there for what ended up being five months before she even saw chimpanzees.
Basically, man, that guy would be like a senior VP at ZIP recruiter, just based on that one pick he made. Yeah, for sure, if you were around today, did you like that? That was a little buzz marketing for one of our advertisers.
They haven't been around in a while, so okay, well for maybe they'll come back.
So yeah, Lewis leaky. Apparently she started out as a secretary for him, right, yeah, And then I guess he found out that she wanted to do animal studies, and he said, okay, here's your chance. I'm going to send you to Tanzania to study chimpanzees. We don't know much about chimpanzees. We want you to go find out all about them. And so, at age twenty six in nineteen sixty, she arrived in Tanzania with her mom. Because the Tanzanian government I believe it was still a colonial government at the time, if not then at least a transitional government. Still, they required a chaperone for someone in her position, so she brought her mom along, who'd been a great supporter and booster all her life, like you said, And they also very importantly had an cook who was a local named Dominic and within a very short amount of time, both her mom and she came down with malaria and they were very fortunate to have Dominic from what I saw, because he helped nurse them back to health.
Yeah, for sure, he was a big He's kind of like part of the family from what I gathered.
That's what I gathered too.
This is at the Gombi Stream Game Reserve which is now the Gombi Stream National Park, and her mom didn't stay too long. She was there about four months. But while her mom was there, she helped set up a either set up or work with medical camp there to help provide you know, medical services to locals. So her mom was getting in there getting her hands dirty. Eventually would leave to go back to England and Jane stayed there. You know, she was not with Leaky. He didn't like stay there with her. He set her up with his job also apparently was you know, making passes at Erica's Jane Goodall and this kind of popped that throughout her career was a very pretty young scientist at a time when that was fairly unusual, I think, especially where she was located. And she was like, no, thank you, doctor Leaky. I'm not interested, but I appreciate you. You you know trust in trusting this position to me at least, but hands off.
He said, that's what That's just what I wanted to hear.
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure he wanted to hear just that.
So apparently she got set up with six months of funding initially, and she started to get really worried because at least three months passed and she was spending all day every day with a couple of locals who were walking her around the jungle looking like pointing out like this would probably be a pretty good place for chimps to show up. This tree has a bunch of fruit on it. They'd sit around. The chimps wouldn't show up. They did show up, they were covered up by leaves. She couldn't see what they were doing if she got if she moved to get a little closer so she could get about, they would all run away. That was when she saw them, Like she was her research was in great jeopardy. She was, you have to have chimps to study to get more funding and continue your research. So she was starting to get worried by month three or four. And I guess finally she won the trust of at least one group enough that they wouldn't run off when she would just kind of show up and hang out and feed or watch them feed. And I saw that one of the reasons, or one of the ways that she won the trust of the chimpanzee groups that she was observing was by kind of behaving like them, Like she ran around barefoot everywhere. She would hang out in the trees for a long periods of time and just kind of tried to treat them or behave as if they were her peers rather than study subjects or test subjects.
Yeah, I mean, she those one. At one point in the documentary, she's talking about the dangers of where she was and these poison snakes everywhere, and you know, all manner of ways in which you could die out there doing what she was doing, and she was and it didn't sound naive either. She just said, you know, I felt like I was supput And she's got that great British accent too, so it just everything sounds so great. But she said she felt like she was supposed to be there, and that if she just treaded carefully and respected the land and the creatures around her, then they would like allow her to stay there, like these snakes were not going to come bite her and send her away, because she's, like I was, I'm supposed to be here, And it was really kind of a lovely thing. She really seemed like she fit in such that finally, five months in, with time running out, a chimp named David Graybeard obviously she's giving them these names, and he had a kind of looked like me a little bit. He had, this little gray Beard trusted her. He was the first one of that group allowed her to get closer and closer and closer. He eventually alsome bananas, came back for more bananas, and he was the one that said to the other chimps, hey, this lady, she's not too bad. Look at her.
So we then treat bananas.
She's hanging out and the footage of her and we'll get to whether or not this was the correct thing or not later, but the footage of her dead, still holding bananas out in her hand and seeing these very large chimpanzees coming up and taking them from her hands, and the way she's acting is is breathtaking because nobody had done that before.
Yeah, I was gonna say today you could see somebody doing that, And the reason why you could see someone doing this, because Jing Goodall was the first to do it exactly. She had no idea. She had no frame of reference for whether they were going to be violent toward her or whether they were going to throw their poop better or whatever. She had no idea. So that was a real risk that she was taking by interacting with them that directly. And then in addition to it being risky, it was driving any academic who was aware of her work completely baddie, because that is a big nice man. That's not at all what you do. Not only do you not like get attached to them, you certainly don't feed them, you don't interact with their infants, don't you don't give them names. That was another one, David Graybeard. Yes, I'm gonna go with you and assume that that wasn't his actual name, that she gave them that name. And that was driving like academics crazy, like she was doing everything wrong, and yet it was starting to really pay off in aces.
Yeah, they're like, you're not supposed to name Jimps And she's like, have you ever bet at a gym? Jump right?
It's like it's working, Yeah, it really, and it really did work, Like thanks largely thanks to David Graybeard, at least at first who who, like you said, said this lady's all right? And then her patience and then her feeding them an endless supply of bananas. All those three combined to win over the trust of large groups and families of chimpanzees.
Should we take a break, I think we should. All right, We'll be right back with moron. Do you know who? Right after this?
Okay, Chuck, So, Jane Goodall is feeding chimps bananas. At this point, she's named them, named all of them. I mean, she really kind of had to get very creative with the names because she would identify a family lineage by like a letter, so like the F family, all of the members for generations had first names that began with F, like Flow or Flossy or Fabian or Freud, and that's how she kept track of them. But again, other academics would have just given them numbers, like maybe they all started with the same number or something like that, but certainly not names. And from observing them that closely, and I guess, I guess interacting with them probably had a lot to do with it. But interacting with them allowed her to get that close, and by interacting that closely, she was able to see things that up to that point people had no idea chimpanzees were capable of. One of the first things she realized is that they have a huge, intricate, complex social system with hierarchies, like I said, families, alliances, territories, like all sorts of stuff that people just did not realize chips were capable of engaging in.
Yeah, big time. Communication wise, she found out there were at least twenty different sets that they were making to communicate, and that's in addition to any kind of body language or behaviors they may exhibit towards one another. She was the first person that said, hey, these guys aren't just eating bananas and berries and things. They are omnivores. They're eating birds, they're eating insects, they're eating baby baboons. Sometimes she would figure this out later, much to her dismay, they would eat other chimps. But the big finding that she came out with that kind of shook signs to its core was that she observed chimpanzees engaging in object modification, which is basically sort of proto tool making, when they would take blades of grass and sticks and things and strip them down or bend them, or clump blades of grass together and shape them in certain ways to stick into ant hills most effectively and efficiently to draw out ants to eat them. And she was like, hey, wait a minute, Like, the big differentiator up until this point in the history of evolution between us and them is that we use tools. That's all everyone talked about was that we use tools and animals don't, and that's what makes us different. She's like, right here in front of my face, they are using object modification, which is basically a tool.
Yeah, like you just you said it. It shook the scientific world to its foundations. Like that was just such a huge finding that Lewis Leaky declared very famously that we must redefined tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as humans. Like that's how big of a deal.
It was.
Dramatic, it was, But I mean, up to that point, like you said, people just tools made a human. Anything that could make a tool technically qualified as human. Everything else couldn't make tools. So it was a big deal. And then on top of that, to me, even more groundbreaking is that they realized that different groups of chimps use the same tool in different ways, and that like say one group would use the short stick to get termites on it to eat them one by one. Another group would use a longer stick to let a bunch of them walk on and then eat it like a corn cob probably, and that they would pass how to do that down to different generations. And that's culture and its most basic definition that qualifies as culture. And I saw it compared to how Westerners use forks, but people in Asia use chopsticks. They're both the same tool they're used to they're implement to get food to your mouth, but they're just different and they're passed down through the culture their cultural differences. And that's the same thing with the different ways of using a termite stick, right, And that is culture. So she discovered that chimps have cultures as.
Well, and some of them open their presence on Christmas Eve, some of them wait until Christmas more or all kinds of things she observed.
Yeah, that was a big surprise too. They're terrible at wrapping presents too, they're so sloppy.
Another big surprise, Well, they just used the funny papers from Sunday, which can you blame them. Another big surprise was in nineteen sixty two when National Geographic then Geo Society that is, sent a filmmaker, a Dutch filmmaker name Hugo von Lowick there to film her work. She was not thrilled at this idea. She really enjoyed her solitude there. She did not want some dude mucking up the works and kind of quite honestly spoiling her scene that she had going on there. She really enjoyed climbing trees and being alone and not having to deal with some jerk with a camera. But she knew that's where the funding came from. They needed this footage if she was going to continue to get funding. She put up with the sky chainsmoking and throwing his cigarette butts around in the jungle, which upset her very much, But she was like, this guy really loved animals. He was also handsome, and she said it became pretty obvious pretty soon that I was also the subject of his films. Long story short, they fall in love and make a baby.
Right that they nicknamed Grub. Did you see anywhere why they nicknamed their kid Grub? I could not find it.
I would assume because of a grubworm.
But what did he do?
Like?
Did he was he famous for writhing around in the dirt or something like that. Why would you name your kid grub well?
I mean this kid was raised in the jungle. I imagine all he did was writhe around in the dirt. Okay, I mean there's footage of him. He was literally raised in a jungle in a cage. Sounds bad, but it was a big pin that they had previously used for animals, and she decorated it all up for her son just to keep him safe. It was very large. It was like a large, you know, pin, less than a cage, but was a cage. And the other thing she said, too, was that having her own human baby really helped her research it. It made her understand the how chimpanzee mothers behaved and vice versa. And she said it really just added a lot to her understanding of the family groups.
NAT that's pretty neat so around this time, So what that was the early sixties. I think that her husband showed up and her son was born in the late sixties. Nineteen sixty seven, okay, in the I think in nineteen sixty three National Geographic it essentially told the world that Jing goodall existed in what she was doing. There was an article cover article called My Life among the Wild Chimpanzees, and she was starting to recount this is the thing that she would become most advanced at, in addition to chimpanzee's studies, is telling the rest of the world about chimpanzees in order to get the world to keep from driving chimpanzees and other animals into extinction. That was her kind of second love.
Yeah, for sure. And again they started, you know, her the fact that she was an attractive young woman came up in the press and the articles were framed as you know, Beauty and the Beast and nat Geo cover girl and stuff like that, which it bothered her some, but she did realize that that got more attention and that that inspired young women, you know, to develop interest in science and stuff like that. And so she was like, it's it's fine, this is what we're dealing with here in the nineteen sixties, and it's bringing you know, attention to my cause. Right.
Yeah, she would have a really good kind of a feel for that. And I keep speaking of her in the past ten she's not dead. She just turned ninety in April, and she seems to be doing just fine. Her foundation says she still travels about three hundred days a year doing speaking appearances on behalf of chimpanzees and nature and earth in general. And a good example of her kind of figuring out or knowing a good pr piece when she sees it, her opportunity when she sees it came in nineteen eighty seven Gary Larson, who did the Far Side, one of the great comic strips of all time.
You know, oh yeah, that's going to be a subject soon.
Okay, So he did a far Side one one comic panel or one panel comic of a female chimp grooming a male chimp, and the caption is the female chimp saying, well, well, another blonde hair, conducting a little more research with that. Jane Goodall tramp and the Jane Goodall Institute found out about this and sent Gary Larson a cease and desist letter, and that's where everything ended.
No, no, no, of course not, you're just being coy good always out of town. Apparently she got back in town, heard about it, thought it was very funny, said Gary, you can tear up that cease and desist letter, and book your ticket for Africa.
You're going, and you're going, and you're going.
And that's what happened. She reached out to him, he came out there. He actually gave the Institute permission to use the cartoon on T shirts for fundraising. She wrote a preface for one of his book collections and it turned into like this school friendship.
Yeah, so prior to that, we kind of jumped ahead a little bit. But prior to that, she in addition to that National Geographic cover story, less than ten years later, she released her first book, In the Shadow of Man, And this is around where she really became like a science communicator, which she's been forever. She was one of the early ones, pre Sagan even. I mean, she released this book in nineteen seventy one and it was telling the world again about all of the stuff she had found about chimpanzees and really just revolutionizing our understanding of chimpanzees and animals in general. And her work was so significant that, remember she only graduated high school. Cambridge University came a knock in and said, hey, you want a PhD. Because we got a seat for you here, come take it. And she thought about it a while consulting Gary Larson. He said, Hey, I haven't met you yet. This doesn't make any sense, and finally agreed, Sure, I'll get your I'll take a PhD course with you guys Cambridge.
That's right. She got a degree in the study of animal behavior, that's mythology in nineteen sixty six. No, we're all over the place of the timeline. It's fine. I hope everyone gets what is following the story. Sure, for about five years she worked at Stanford as a visiting professor and psychiatry. Also became a visiting professor of zoology at Tanzania's University of Daris Salam. While all this is going on, though, she's not like, oh, by the way, I'm just leaving Gmbhi. For years and years at a time, she was basically there from nineteen sixty to seventy five. It was her home. It was her emotional home, her spiritual home. She felt very, very tied to Gombi into that specific area, and you know that was where she started a family and was raising a son. It was her place.
So I didn't see the documentary did they cover why she left? Was it because of her son? Because I saw that she was conflicted, and I realized she had to decide raise a sun or study chimps.
Yeah, he had to be schooled formally schooled in England. But also there was the issue of her marriage, and that's you know, we might as well talk about it now. She started to travel some with her husband to other places for him to film because he didn't get all his work through that GEO. Eventually he has work with them completely dried up, so he had no reason to be there other than the fact that his wife was there and loved her work. But it was at a time and he was one of these guys where he was like, hey, you know, work comes first and I hope you can support me. She did that for a little while and then she said by that time, in a very English way, she said that had we had begun bickering, and that seemed to be the kindest way to say that. You know, their marriage was kind of on fragile ground and they would eventually part ways because of that and because of life and work, and it just seemed like it didn't work.
Out, gotcha. So five years after she started, she established the Gombi Stream Research Center again in the Gombi Wildlife preserve game preserve, which means you can go hunt there. She very fortunately met and married a member of parliament in tan Zania named Derek Bryson, and he happened to direct the country's national parks and went presto Chanjo and turned the game reserve into a national park protecting Gambia and its inhabitants.
Pretty cool, it is pretty cool.
Unfortunately, he passed away from cancer five years later, and from that point on, Jane Goodall was a swinging solo lady.
That's right, and you know, I'm sure it was a tragedy for her life, but she sort of ended up being married to her work and seemed very happy to be. She spent decades and decades at the Gambi Center, publishing hundreds of papers. All kinds of researchers and doctoral students have done field work there, gotten their PhDs through there. She is still very active, like you said, as part of the Jane Goodall Institute, which is basically run by Tanzanians and has just you know, she's it's easy to think now, like you said, like you see so many documentaries and so much footage of people doing research and just no one had done this stuff to that degree at the time, as far as just living among the animals. And it just can't be overstated how revolutionary this idea was. This twenty six year old, you know, young British woman was just like, yeah, that's what I want to do. I want to climb a tree and be with them.
Yeah. And Lewis Leaky had a knack for picking the right people for this kind of work. He also hired two other young women over the years. Diane Fosse, who studied gorillas in Rwanda who is very memorably played by Sigourney Weaver and Gorillas in the Mist. Yeah, and another woman named Berrute Galdicas who studied orangutangs in Borneo. And when you put Diane Fossei and Barute Galdicas and Jan Good all together, you had the group that were known as the Trymates.
Pretty funny.
We just couldn't not mention that it was just too good.
I mean, we didn't give them that name. No, no, actually, to make it clear.
Yeah, So, Chuck, we're starting to have a little too much fun. I say, we need to take a break and recompose ourselves, come back and just get serious again.
All right, all right, so earlier in the episode you mentioned a family made up of the letter F where she you know, this is how she named and cataloged these groups in these families and it would help her keep track of things. And we're gonna tell you a little story that Livia dug up about the F family led by Flow, who was the mama to her young children. And Flow was pretty instrumental in good Alls understanding of just how these chip families worked. And then later through the just beyond the family, the whole group and local culture of that family.
Right, and the whole group that they studied that the Flow in her family were members of was the cass Kela. And there were other groups that ended up being studied, if not by a good All, but by other research scientists and doctoral students who showed up over the decades. But kesse Kela was the group that she kind of made her name on and did her research on originally. And like you said, from studying these these families so closely, she watched like how generations interacted sometimes with their own kin group like Flow had a son named Fabian who overthrew his younger brother, who's overthrown by his younger brother Fagan to become the dominant male, and she noticed, like becoming a dominant male of your family or of your group, I should say, there's not one set way to do it. Some do it by Some chimpanzees do it by being kind and calm in the face of aggression. Others do it through sheer force and bullying. Vegan was known to just basically do it through trickery, like he would lead others in the group away from food and then run back and get it himself. Somehow he became the dominant male. But by studying these chimpanzees this closely, she was able to kind of see individual personalities and how those personalities work together to create a society.
Yeah, and it's you know, well, it's a game of thrones up in there, basically. Yeah. He had Flow's daughter, Fifi, she became the dominant female. She gave birth to nine kids, one of which was a daughter named Flossi, So this is Flow's grand baby. Flossie ended up leaving that group for a neighboring community called the Matumba Community. Another one of her children was Freud, born in seventy one. Freud grew up and then along with Fifi and Vegan helped him rise within that hierarchy even though he was like not really cut out for the job. Became the dominant male in nineteen ninety three. So, like families are leaving communities joining up with others who had previously left the community, they're kind of grooming successors and like propping up other chimps is like helping them become the leader and the dominant male or female. And it's just just fascinating for her to sit there and like document all this stuff.
Yeah, it's very much Kevellian totally. Now we have to talk about Frodo, who was one of Fifi's sons, one of Flow's grandsons. He was born in nineteen seventy six, and he is one of the more famous chimpanzees of all time because he was bad to the bone. Yeah, he was. You if you believe in chimps having an internal life and empathy and awareness of others' experiences, then you would consider Frodo a.
Murderer, straight up murderer, totally for real.
I've seen it argue that he should be considered a murderer. He was just that bad.
Yeah, I mean, he killed people, he did.
So he deposed his brother Freud back in nineteen ninety seven, and he was one of the He was the one I was citing when I said some of them do it just through sheer force and intimidation. That was Frodo. He didn't have a lot of friends, he didn't have many alliances. He was just the biggest chimp and the meanest chimp. And he from a young age he started bullying Jane Goodall. I think I don't want to anthropomorphise here, but I'm quite certain, one hundred percent certain in fact, that he noted Jane Goodall was the person in charge of the humans, and he targeted her specifically. He attacked other humans over the years, but Jane Goodall. They said that he would have a certain look on his face that he reserved just for her, and he put her in for some of the worst treatment, almost broke her neck once, and she said kind of famously that she was alive because he wasn't trying to kill her, that he was just trying to show her who is boss, and that if he wanted her dead, she would be dead right now.
Which you know, again not to use the A word, but it sounds like he had respect for her.
Yeah, yeah, in a way, like a kind of a backhanded way.
I would say he allowed her to live.
Right, I guess so, or maybe he'd needed her.
He let Gary Larson live in nineteen eighty eight when Carrie Larson got his arm yanked, giving him a legit injury. So that happened as well, but very sadly. Frodo was probably most well known for killing a toddler, a fourteen month old in two thousand and two. It was the daughter of a park attendant who was visiting with his wife, and he killed this fourteen month old and partially ate this fourteen month old, and people spoke up and were like, hey, you need to kill this chimp and take him out, and Jane Goodall went to bat for him, and it's like, basically, it's a chimp being a chimp, and we're the ones that are here, and you know there's cars killing kids all over the place. You know, go out and take all the cars away.
That's called a straw man argument.
It is.
There's a thing though, the remember I said, I saw, I'd argue that like he was a Frodo should be considered a murderer. Certainly could be yeah, I think the same person who made that argument was had been a researcher at Gambi and argued, like, yes, we need to kill Frodo. He's a murderer. Like he did that, he knew what he was doing. He's a murderer. We need to put him down. And she argued that they intervened when the chimps were starving, they intervened when they needed medical attention, but they're not going to intervene when the chimp murders a human baby. It just seemed like a pretty good argument, I think. At the same time, though, if you're Jane Goodall and you're like, well, chimps are kind of like humans, and humans are kind of like chimps. We don't kill Frodo when he eats chimp babies, which they do, so why would you do that for.
A human baby.
Seems a little out of touch to me with you know, human society in general. But I guess I get both sides in that case.
Yeah, I mean that's one of the things we should talk about. I guess is that later in her career, she you know, she basically said, hey, if I had it to do over again, I would do it differently. We probably should not have been feeding these things bananas. We probably shouldn't have been I shouldn't have been holding baby chimps like they were human babies and petting them and stuff. And I should have maybe been a little more dispassionate in my work because if you want, you know, really accurate data and results, like again, you shouldn't be handing them food and stuff. So, you know, she came clean about the things that she felt like she had her missteps over the years as a researcher. So I take my hat off to her for that, and very sadly, it looks like, you know, it's possible at least that they're stay there, their interactions, they're just merely being there. Could have been one of the factors in what was known as the Gombi chimpanzee War, when in nineteen seventy one there was kind of a full on war between two groups of chimpanzees that played out right in front of her eyes.
Yeah, so the dominant male of the Caskela group died and I guess he was holding the glue together. This guy was like Tito or something, and the group splintered. I think nine adults and their kids said, we're going to form our own group, and they took over the southern half of the range, and the original Caskela. The remaining Caskela they stuck to the northern part of the range at first. I think over the years, the male started making aggressive sounds and gestures to one another, and it became clear that they were no longer treating them as a kin group. You know, these were no longer friends, even though they had been super tight friends when they lived together. These were now enemies and trespassers and encroachers, and the whole thing came to a head starting in nineteen seventy four when Godie, one of the members of the tribe that had broken away and took up in the south, was just sitting there eating fruit and six Caskela males ambushed him and I had to get away, and they got him and they beat him to death over a period I think about ten minutes, and that kicked off the what are known as, like you said, the Gombi Chimpanzee War.
Yeah, and then other wars had been documented since then in different areas between different groups, and like I said, you know, part of the reason was they were being sort of choked out by human development. Part of it was because there was a more stressful atmosphere though, with people there watching and observing and doing what she was doing. So I don't I'm not going to say that really charnished her work. If anything, it did show that they observed something else that they didn't know had previously happened, which is they could be very territorial and go to war like this. But since that time she has just been a tireless advocate for animals over the ensuing decades, like you said, into her early nineties now with the Jane Goodall Institute that is based in Virginia, has twenty offices around the world, and she continues to write books and speak and do ted talks, and she's just still kicking it.
Yeah. She had a podcast called the jing Goodall Hope Cast that she launched during the pandemic, and then as soon as she could stop, she stopped. The last episode came out in twenty twenty two. She's very famously her quote was that sucked.
Yeah. By the way, when I said she's still kicking it, I meant kicking, but like not just kicking it on the couch. That's what kicking it really kicking. Yeah. Now she's just still very active, and I just have a lot of respect for the lady. She's awesome.
Yeah, she is an awesome person, and yeah she gets criticized by people in academia still, But like I said at the outset, she's just the world loves her, like she's done so much good that whatever missteps she has or whatever weird side she takes in moral quandaries, like the world just forgives her. It's like it's Jane Goodall. She does good for the planet and has the whole time essentially agreed. If you want to know more about Jane Goodall, there's a lot to read about her and by her, and you can listen to her hope casts. I presume they didn't erase all of the episodes. And in the meantime, while you're looking all that stuff up, let's go ahead and kick it old school with listener mail.
Let me call this the Ballad of grit, because that is what Ed calls it, Okay in the subject line, Hey guys, I'm a self described band of great I should say I've never considered myself a conscientious person to the full meaning of the word. However, I do consider one of my strengths is being responsible. My opinion is that it's an insult for a gritty person to be confused with being conscientious. Conscientiousness is a luxury for the already bright minded person. In my opinion, I believe most intelligent people who are successful are equally gifted with conscientiousness. Grit, on the other hand, is the ugly twin of conscientiousness. It's the path less travel to success. It's how I got through college during an engineering degree, even though I graduated with a low GPA, barely scraping by in many classes and had to retake some because I didn't pass to begin with. My road was less traveled than it was a tough one. I worked forty hours a week for five years while I supported myself in college, and I was compared to my peer graduates with whom I lived at home with her parents, who had the funds to build proper projects for courses. Grit is invisible, guys. It can't be measured. Comes from within. Grit is what you have when you succeed without conscientiousness. I love the show that is from ED.
I think ED is a pseudonym for Angela Duckworth. I think this is Angela Duckworths writing in it. Good email, Yeah, this is a good email. Good for you for persevering. Hats off to you, man, for sure, I admire anybody who worked and put themselves through college. That's really something I like me. Yes, I admire you for that.
Oh, the first part was paid for and then I was on my own.
Hey man, even a little bit still counts like that. That's hard to do.
You know that was fine? Waited tables whatever.
Shate it, all right, just forget it. I'll direct my comments toward Ed only then.
All right, No, I appreciate it. I appreciate it.
If you want to be like ED and give us an email to argue over, we love that kind of thing. You can get in touch with us via stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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