In the Shadow of Man.

Book review by Joel
This was the first installment of The Planet of the Apes series, where the first person narrator, Jane, is transported to ……wait a minute…

This is Jane Goodall’s first book on the chimpanzees, which she has spent her life studying in Africa’s Gombe Stream National Park. This book really caused a stir in the early seventies when it came out, particularly because of comparisons with human emotions and tool making descriptions. Hugo van Lawick, a National Geographic photographer, backed up Jane’s descriptions with color photos in the wild. They eventually married and had a son, little Hugo. Until she went to Africa to study animals, no one had done any long term studies of chimpanzees in the wild. As they are our closest genetic relatives it was important to study them, especially since their habitat was shrinking. Jane was recruited by Dr. L. S. B. Leakey to work on the study, and got her initial funding to stay in the park.

It turned out that she was very good at observing and taking notes. Even though the chimps would be months before they would accept her being anywhere near them, she was persistent. With the initial help of her mother, she was able to set up camp and even care for the sick in the fishing village close by. As the months wore on, eventually she walked up to a fruit tree that a group was feeding on and thought that they had disappeared, but found David Graybeard and Goliath staring at her. She sat down and watched them as they groomed each other only 20 yards away. As Goliath was the alpha male of the group, the other would eventually see Jane as less than threatening. Before that, they would scatter if she was 500 yards close to them.

One of the things I thought about while reading this book was Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principal, which says you can measure a particle’s mass and you can measure it’s speed but you can't know both--the more precise the first measurement, the inverse is true of the other. I wondered if the closer Jane got to the chimps the less “wild” they were around her. I thought about this as she was describing the banana feeding station they set up to more closely study group relations. Once they relied on the feeding station, they no longer traveled to other sites like they normally would have. After some time they realized this and set up a different way to feed the chimps so that it was more natural.

This book was written for the layperson as well as for the people who would contribute funds to keep the research alive. She is still in Africa and has formed the Jane Goodall Research Center, which still does the work she started in 1960. They have a web site: www.janegoodall.org.

I recommend this book.

Joel.