Jane Goodall Contribution To Anthropology

In the year 1960, Jane Goodall, a young, naive and optimistic secretarial school graduate, was sent to Gombe Stream Research Center located in East Africa in the country of Tanzania off of Kungwe Bay by fossil-hunter Louis Leakey where she would spend the next thirty years observing pan troglodytes, or chimpanzees, in their natural habitat and to study their social life, including topics such as friendship, loyalty, and social power. During this time, Goodall made several crucial discoveries that have not only impacted the field of anthropology but has changed the way we look at ourselves as members of the environment shared with millions of other species.
It was in October of 1960 that Goodall would make one of the most important scientific
However, both humans and chimpanzees are capable of showing multiple emotions such as affection, support, and strong family bonds. Goodall even saw mother chimpanzees adopt orphans whose parents had died even if they were not a close relative and saw multiple occasions where they would embrace and kiss each other, much like people. Humans and chimpanzees are also similar in the fact that they both have long periods where the child is dependant on the parent, albeit the chimpanzees do not need quite as much."One of the most important milestones in the life of a young male is when he begins to travel away from his mother with other members of the community.”118 By far the thing that makes humans so ‘unique’ is their capability for verbal communication. But communication is not something foreign to chimpanzees; they communicate in nonverbal patterns and employ sophisticated social scenes. In her studies, Goodall commented that she hoped her discoveries would ‘humble’ humanity. Goodall detested the common conscious of chimpanzees of the time, saying, "It is ... convenient to believe that the creature you are using, while it may react in disturbingly human-like ways, is, in fact, merely a mindless and, above all, unfeeling, 'dumb' animal" (16). Goodall fought hard to show that chimpanzees were more than mindless vegetables and the proof is littered all throughout her work. “...the chimpanzee is more like us than any other living creature. There is close resemblance in the physiology of our two species and genetically, in the structure of DNA, chimpanzees and humans differ by only just over one per cent” (pg 38). All of these findings further solidified that humans and chimpanzees were undeniably