Culture and Communication
Case: Chimpanzee group, Gombe reserve, Tanzania,
Africa.
Question: How intelligent are chimpanzees?
Researcher: Jane Goodall
Jane Goodall spent over 30 years of her life
studying chimpanzees in the wild. This
is the longest, inter-species fieldwork study ever conducted. Dr. Goodall has completely revised how we
view and understand of our “closest cousins.”
The film, Introduction to Chimpanzee Behavior (available in the
GL Media Center) documents the initial phase of her field work, including the
18 months it took her to make friends with the chimpanzees and “enter the
field.”
In the summer of 1960, twenty-six-year old Jane
Goodall set out for Africa. She set up
a base of operations at the protected Gombe reserve in Tanzania, to study
chimpanzees through the anthropologist’s preferred fieldwork technique of
participant observation. At that time,
her study was unorthodox in several ways.
One of the most unusual aspects of Goodall’s research was that she named
and, over time, developed close relationships and friendships with several of
her chimpanzee subjects. This approach
was controversial, but it also proved to be fruitful and opened the door for
many important discoveries. Goodall
documented the chimpanzees’ ability to make and use rudimentary tools, such as
altering long grass stems to pull termites from mounds. She discovered that chimps occasionally hunt
and kill other animals, including other species of monkeys. She documented acts of courage and
compassion among chimps. She observed
and recorded their complex system of communication, including individual voice
recognition.
In the beginning of her study, Goodall believed that
chimpanzees were kinder and gentler than humans. However, after years of study, she also discovered their dark
side. She reported that chimpanzee
groups sometimes split apart and wage war on each other. She recorded a war in
which one group, over time, completely eliminated a neighboring group.
Jane Goodall rejects the idea that it is necessary
for a researcher to remain emotionally removed from his/her subjects and to
simply observe and record. She believes
that it is possible to feel empathy for your subjects and become an advocate
for them, while still making objective observations. Today, Dr. Goodall has grown from a stranger into the
chimpanzees’ loyal friend and strongest ally in the fight to preserve the
chimpanzees and their natural habitat.
Her lifelong dedication to the study of chimps has helped to identify
them as man’s closest relative, with whom we share aspects of social
organization, communication and child development.
Based on Goodall’s research, scientists have asked,
“How intelligent are chimps?” and sought to establish whether apes can learn to
communicate with human beings. In the
late 1960s, it was first reported that a young chimpanzee named Washoe in Reno,
Nevada, had been taught to produce hand signs similar to those used by deaf
humans. After anthropologists concluded
that chimps could not learn to speak English (due to a physical lack of vocal
equipment, such as the pharynx and larynx), several creative researchers
decided to work around the anatomical obstacles by trying to teach chimpanzees
American Sign Language (ASL).
It was found that chimpanzees could master a
vocabulary of about 200 words. This may
not seem like much until one realizes that a bare bones, operational English
vocabulary consists of only about 1,000 words.
Therefore, chimps have already mastered in sign language, a vocabulary,
which is equivalent to about 20% of a minimal English vocabulary. In additional, the chimps also began to
compose new words to describe things that they had not seen or experiences
before (“water-bird” for duck; “cry-hurt-food” upon tasting a radish for the
first time).
It was also discovered that chimpanzees have the
ability to recognize themselves on television, to play video games using a
joy-stick, and to catch and trap a video villain. They also enjoy music and have showed a preference for jazz over
rock. Studies are now being conducted
to determine if chimps, who have mastered ASL, will pass this symbolic
information on to the next generation.
With all of this compelling evidence of chimpanzee intelligence, Carl Sagan, the astrophysicist, asks the question, “Why are apes imprisoned in laboratories all over the world?”
Recommended
Resources:
Carl
Sagan, Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence.
Jane
Goodall, In the Shadow of Man.
Michael
Creighton, Congo (fiction).
Gorillas
in the Mist (film)
R. Lederer, Anguished English.