Jane Goodall lasting legacy and partnership with ASU

Jane Goodall left a lasting legacy, especially in Arizona. ASU is the repository for the Jane Goodall Institute Gombe Research Archive, a resource for scientific discovery that represents more than 60 years of research data on wild chimpanzees.

Ian Gilby is the co-director of the Gombe Chimpanzee Database, which contains over six decades of detailed behavioral, ecological and demographic data from the long-term study of two chimpanzee communities in Gombe National Park, Tanzania.

Gilby joined “Arizona Horizon” to discuss more on the archives and talk about the impact that Goodall left.

“She basically pioneered the field of primatology as we know it today.” Gilby said. Goodall also pioneered the idea that animals have their own personalities and that they’re not just numbers. “They’re individual beings.”

“At that point in time, people thought of animals as just reactionary things. That didn’t have any sort of emotions or feelings or thoughts at all,” this is part of the reason why this was such a groundbreaking idea at the time. “She was one of the first if not the first to really highlight how similar chimpanzees and humans are in the good.”

Goodall spent a long time with the chimpanzees and according to Gilby it took a while for them to realize that she’s not a threat or prey. “It took months for her to get their trust if you will… She was extraordinarily patient and would go out into the forest and would sit up on a spot that would be named Jane’s peak and she would use her binoculars to observe them.”

“It is impossible to study these animals without us being there. So we can’t know what our effect is going to be but I think in general we feel that the research itself is whats keeping these populations going.”