We therefore have much to commemorate 50 years after Goodall began her strolls through Gombe. This work has held up a mirror, albeit a blurred one, to our own species, suggesting that a great many of our behaviours, once thought to be uniquely human, may have been inherited from the common ancestors that Homo sapiens shared with chimpanzees six million years ago. They also made war, wiping out members of their own species with almost genocidal brutality on one occasion that was observed by Goodall. They experienced adolescence, developed powerful mother-and-child bonds, and used political chicanery to get what they wanted. Goodall's subsequent observations found that not only did Pan troglodytes – the chimpanzee – make and use tools but that our nearest evolutionary cousins embraced, hugged, and kissed each other. As the distinguished Harvard palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould put it, this was "one of the great achievements of 20th-century scholarship". Certainly, there is little doubt about the importance of Goodall's discovery five decades ago. His response has since become the stuff of scientific legend: "Now we must redefine man, redefine tools, or accept chimpanzees as humans." Leakey was exaggerating but not by much. Goodall telegraphed her boss, the fossil-hunter Louis Leakey (father of Richard), with the news. I remember that day as vividly as if it was yesterday." I had been told from school onwards that the best definition of a human being was man the tool-maker – yet I had just watched a chimp tool-maker in action. "At that time, it was thought that humans, and only humans, used and made tools. "It was hard for me to believe," she recalls.
She witnessed a creature, other than a human, in the act not just of using a tool but of making one. Thus Jane Goodall made one of the most important scientific observations of modern times in that remote African rainforest. Then he began to spoon termites into his mouth. So she stopped and watched the animal through her binoculars as he carefully took a twig, bent it, stripped it of its leaves, and finally stuck it into the nest.
A large male chimpanzee was foraging for food. F ifty years ago, a slender young Englishwoman was walking through a rainforest reserve at Gombe, in Tanzania, when she came across a dark figure hunched over a termite nest.
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