Modern Mind

text, if not more so, helping the book to sell more than five million copies in a dozen languages, not to mention a major movie and several documentaries. Joy had originally taken on the cubs because they were ‘orphans,’ and, in the 1950s, maternal deprivation in humans was, as we have seen, an important issue in the wake of war. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Joy and/or George continued to live close to lions, exploring in an informal but unique way their real nature. They were criticised for ‘ruining’ lions, making them less lionlike because they were friendly to humans, but between them the Adamsons were able to show that, fierce and wild as lions undoubtedly are, their violence is not completely programmed, by no means 100 percent instinctive; they at least appear to be capable of affection or respect or familiarity, and the needs of their stomach are not always paramount. tell Hughes, Britain’s poet laureate, had this to say in reviewing
Born Free
: ‘That a lioness, one of the great moody aggressors, should be brought to display suchqualities as Elsa’s, is a step not so much in the education of lions as in the civilisation of man’ * 9
    Jane Goodall, like Dian Fossey after her, was a protégé of Louis Leakey. Apart from his other talents, Leakey was a great womaniser, who had affairs with a number of female assistants. Goodall had approached Leakey as early as 1959, the year of Zinj, begging to work for/with him. When he met her, Leakey noted that Goodall was very knowledgeable about animals, and so was born a project that had been simmering at the back of his mind for some time. He knew of a community of chimpanzees at Gombe Stream, near Kigoma on the shore of Lake Tanganyika. Leakey’s thinking was simple: Africa had a very rich ape population; man had evolved from the apes; and so the more we discovered about them, the more we were likely to understand how mankind – humanity – had evolved. Leakey thought Goodall suitable because, while she was knowledgeable, she wasn’t too academic, and her mind wasn’t ‘cluttered by theory.’ Not that there
was
much theory at the time – ethology was a new subject – but Goodall loved her assignment, and both her official reports and her popular account,
In the Shallow of Man,
published in 1971, managed to be both scientifically important and moving at the same time. 10
    Goodall found that it took the chimpanzees some months to accept her, but once they did she was able to get close enough to observe their behavior in the wild
and
to distinguish one chimpanzee from another. This simple insight proved extremely important. She was later criticised by other, more academically grounded scientists for giving her chimps names – David Greybeard, Flo, Flint, Flame, Goliath – instead of more neutral numbers, and for reading motives into chimp actions, but these were lame criticisms when set against the richness of her material. 11 Her first significant observation occurred when she saw a chimp insert a thin stick into a termite mound in order to catch termites that attached themselves to the stick – the chimp then raised the stick to its lips. Now here was a chimp using a tool, hitherto understood to be the hallmark of humanity. As the months passed, the social/communal life of these primates also began to reveal itself. Most notable was the hierarchy of males and the occasional displays of aggression that brought about this ranking, which by and large determined sexual privilege in the troupe, but not necessarily priority in food gathering. But Goodall also recorded that much of the aggressive displays were just that – displays – and that once the less dominant male had made deferential or submissive gestures, the dominant animal would pat his rival in what appeared to be a gesture of reassurance. Goodall also observed mother-offspring behavior, the importance of social grooming (picking unwanted matter out of each other’s fur), and what appeared to be familial feeling. Young chimpanzees who for some reason lost their mothers shrivelled physically and/or became nervous – what we would call neurotic; and brothers, though they often fought with or were indifferent to each other, sometimes ran to one another for comfort and reassurance. Controversially, she thought that chimpshad a rudimentary sense of self and that children learned much behavior from their mothers. In one celebrated instance, she observed a mother with diarrhoea wipe