IN 1991 she was awarded the prestigious Edinburgh Medal and now, six months after the death of the legendary Dr Jane Goodall, there will be a celebration in Scotland of her groundbreaking work with chimpanzees.
One of the guest speakers will be her long-standing colleague, Dr Anthony Collins, director of baboon research at Gombe in Tanzania, who completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh.
In a special interview with the Sunday National, Dr Collins, who has spent most of his life working in Tanzania, said he was looking forward to returning to Edinburgh for the celebration during the durin next month.
“My first schooling was in Edinburgh, my mother was an Edinburgh lass and my grandfather was the first professor of geography at the University of Edinburgh so I am very excited about coming back,” he said.
Dr Collins joined Dr Goodall in 1972 in Tanzania at the time when her research was overturning accepted ideas about chimpanzees.
“Although there was recognition that they are our closest relative in the animal kingdom, Jane was the first person ever to be accepted by a community of chimpanzees,” he explained.
“She could walk around among them, recognise them, see what relationships they had and see how their daily life was conducted which was fantastic information.”
This resulted in two revelations that blew a hole in what was thought to be the main differences between humans and chimpanzees.
“All the anthropologists were looking at what they thought separated our human ancestors from apes and one was the general idea of man, the hunter, but Jane found that chimpanzees were not only hunting and eating meat but also that they could make tools, which was thought to be the other big difference between humans and chimpanzees,” said Dr Collins.
It was known at the time that animals used tools but it was thought that only humans made them.
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However Dr Goodall found chimpanzees catching termites by using a little slender wand of vegetation to fish them out of the termite mounds and eat them.
The wands of vegetation were carefully selected by the chimps so that they were the right length and flexibility. They then stripped the leaves off to make them into exactly the right kind of tool to extract the termites.
The discoveries meant that she was inundated with requests from people who wanted to work with her on her chimpanzee research but she felt the baboons in the area were also worthy of study and asked Dr Collins to work with them.
At first, he wasn’t particularly keen because baboons had a bad reputation at the time and were considered aggressive but it became his life’s work at the research centre in Gombe.
“I could have become a chimp person over these many years, but I’ve resisted it because the baboons need somebody – let’s not say fighting their corner – but at least waving their flag and blowing their trumpet and that’s my job now,” he said.
“They’re different from chimps but I respect them greatly. Chimps are very intelligent and they’re thinking about yesterday, thinking about tomorrow, making plans and so forth. But a baboon lives in the moment. They are fantastically sharp and absolutely street smart.”
Under Dr Collins’s leadership, the baboon research programme at Gombe has been running for more than 50 years and has expanded the knowledge of primate behaviour, family dynamics and the challenges they face due to habitat loss and climate change.
Dr Goodall’s chimpanzee study at Gombe has now been going on for 65 years.
“People ask why we are still going on but we’re still learning things that are amazing and which we could never have imagined,” said Dr Collins.
If you could sum up the major finding of all the chimpanzee research, he said it would be that they are just like people except they don’t have language.
“They’re very good at what they do, so to say they’re lesser than we are is wrong,” Dr Collins said. “Their brains are not as big, so they’re not so flexible in their behaviour as we are but those are the only differences, because everything else that we have, they have. Their social life is just like ours. It’s a matter of family life, sex, politics, all the things we’re familiar with.
“The conclusion which Jane drew from that, and I agree, is that we’re therefore part of the animal kingdom.”
Dr Collins added: “People in Scotland, like people everywhere, should please appreciate that we have learned that we’re part of nature. We’re not separate from it and we therefore have responsibility, because all those creatures have a right to be here, just like we do. We should at least respect them, help them to continue and not just plunder and ravage and exploit the environment at their expense.”
However, despite all the research and work to protect chimpanzees, their numbers are declining, mainly because human are destroying their habitats.
It made Dr Goodall realise that the chimps could not be saved unless the forest was saved and that the forest could not be saved unless the people who were destroying it to feed their families could be helped to live more sustainably.
“People need to make use of the resources too, so the question is for humans and the environment to live together sustainably and Jane took that message worldwide,” Dr Collins said.
“She used to travel to raise money for the chimpanzees but everywhere she went, she saw the same problems mirrored in every country of the world. Population is increasing. The natural environment is not respected.
“Things are going wrong, and the extreme final result is that the climate itself is changing simply because of the sheer number of people and the misuse of the natural environment.”
Dr Goodall realised that if there were to be long-term change then it was up to young people, so she formed a youth programme called Roots and Shoots which has spread all over the world and is empowering young people to tackle projects and make changes in their own environment.
“If there were 10 kids in a school all concerned about the environment she would encourage them to get together, see what they wanted to work on, make a plan and do it,” said Dr Collins.
“She would tell them if they needed money not to ask her, as she didn’t have it, but to ask philanthropists or those who are polluting the land, cutting down the trees or whatever.
“So these kids, they go and do it and they see within a year or so that it has a result. They do it and they stop the erosion on the hillside, or they clean up the river.”
The programme started in Tanzania and is now making a huge difference worldwide.
“These young people are the politicians, the planners, the policy makers of the future and if they’ve got Roots and Shoots in their heart, it’s there for life,” said Dr Collins.
Goodall dedicated the last 30 years of her life to the programme, working on it right up to the day she died at the age of 91 in October last year.
Dr Collins said that despite everything that is going on in the world today, her message would be not to give up hope.
“Jane would say you must not give up. You must not lose hope. Do what you can where you are to make things better. If we all do, if we all work together, there’s still hope. There is still time left. So please, please don’t lose hope,” Dr Collins said.
The celebration of Jane Goodall’s life and work will be on April 15 at Edinburgh’s McEwan Hall.
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