Al Jazeera World

Jane Goodall: Chimpanzees, Humanity And All That Binds Them (2018x15)

Data di messa in onda: Giu 24, 2018

Widely seen as the world's leading primatologist and conservationist, Jane Goodall has an unparalleled understanding of chimpanzees. Goodall's study of chimpanzees, human beings' 'closest living relatives on earth', began in 1960 when she travelled to Tanzania for this sole purpose. Her moment of international recognition came with the broadcast of the documentary 'Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees' across the United States. However, Goodall's career hasn't always been embraced by society. As discoveries were made establishing the real biological and behavioural similarities between chimpanzees and human beings, the resistance in both the press and general public grew, the main point of contention being how a woman - without a university degree - could make such claims about humanity. As science backed the facts Goodall continued to uncover, those issues were more or less laid to rest; but the peoples' trust in science and what studying chimpanzees could tell us about humanity, especially whether aggression was an innate trait or something learned, was a real political predicament. 'At that time, in the early 1970s, it was a political issue. Science was divided as to whether human infants are born with a clean slate, everything is learned from your culture, your society, from your mother ... I was saying, no, some things are inherited, it's instinctive - I know as a mother. When your child is threatened you get this surge of adrenaline and sometimes anger. It's not rational, but it's there,' Goodall recalls. 'It's mostly people who don't want to admit that animals have personalities, minds, and above all, emotions.' In light of an upcoming visit to chimpanzee sanctuary Ngamba Island, Goodall also recalls the maltreatment and abuse of primates at the Entebbe zoo when she first visited Uganda under then-president Idi Amin's rule. 'They [Entebbe zoo] had about eight or nine infa