The Great Apes [antikvár]

liilH^^ skilled by years of practice and by the example of her own mother, Fifi tends baby Faustina, youngest of five offspring in 1989. "Cbimpanzee infants seem to have unlimited energy," remarks Jane Goodall. Often Fifi romps with her children—and sometitnes she prefers to relax and watch. Mature males normally tolerate infants, however pesky, and on occasion an adult may take a special interest in a certain youngster; hut in this promiscuous species a father as such has no social role in the wild. eep in the forest, I sat near the small group of chimpanzees. Fifi groomed her daughter Fanni. Fifi's son Faustino, three and a half years old, stared intently at the newborn infant she cradled—his brother Ferdinand. Fanni's infant. Fax, reached out to pull one of Ferdinand's small hands, but Fifi pushed her grandson away. Nearby, Fanni's young sister Flossi played by herself, laughing as she stimulated that ticklish place between neck and shoulder with a rough stone. Fifi's two oldest sons, Freud and Frodo, were away with the other adult males, courting a female. My mind slipped back easily to a time 21 years before, when I had sat thus with Fifi's much-loved mother, the old matriarch Flo. That was in 1971, when Fifi had just given birth to Freud, and her brother Flint was still alive. Flo had been dead now for twenty years, and Flint too, for he had died grieving for his mother. Flo's two eldest sons had been alive then: Faben, who lost the use of one arm in the polio outbreak of 1966 and learned to walk long distances upright, and Figan, who with Faben's support had risen to top position in the male hierarchy and reigned for eight years. Eventful years when we learned that chimpanzees, like humans, have a dark side to their nature: They are aggressively territorial, and may hunt down members of neighboring communities and assault them fatally. We even observed a few cases of infanticide and cannibalism. Fifi, the prolific male Evered, and the sterile female Gigi are the only survivors of the chimps I knew when I arrived at Gombe in I960 to begin what has become the longest field study of any animal group in the wild. In the sixties, those of us working with the great apes in the field all knew one another—we were a tiny band. Today, several hundred people from around the world are actively engaged in field studies, and many more are working on ape behavior in captivity. And the nature of fieldwork has changed dramatically. In those days everything was new; almost nothing was known about the worid of our closest relatives. We watched, we wrote in our little field notebooks, and we marveled at tlie complex behavior that we observed, the fascinating characters that we gradually came to know. Today, students come into the field with specific questions and make detailed studies of particular aspects of behavion I began on my own at Gombe, but built up an interdisciplinary team of students from around the world. Then, in 1975, four students were kidnapped by rebels from Zaire and held for ransom. Eventually they were returned, after an incredibly harrowing experience. After that the Tanzanian field staff, already well trained, took over the research. Even now they make most of the day-to-day observations. These men lack formal higher education, but they understand the chimpanzees and they excel in following them around over rugged terrain. They make detailed written reports, use state-of-the-art tape recorders, and operate video cameras charged from solar panels. During my last visit Yahaya Alamasi, a born cameraman, showed