Each hurdle she put in front of them, they lept across, until her work destroyed all the rules about what made you and I human. Goodall approached her fieldwork expecting to see them fail the tests of human-ness, things like using tools, caring for their families, working as a group, planning their actions. In the book, she shares every step with readers–how she followed the chimps until they finally accepted her presence without fleeing, how she learned to identify each animal and in that way track their lives, how she came to understand their verbal and body language, how she became a better mother by watching Flo’s parenting skills.Īt the time she wrote this book, chimpanzees were not considered human–still aren’t. From there, she invented everything else that would allow her to investigate these fascinating primates.

She entered Tanzania with an open mind, a patient attitude and an interest in exploring the capers of wild chimpanzees. She had no formal background in primatology or fieldwork when she began this study. This is the memoir that began her career, that relays her start in the field of anthropology, how she conducted her early studies and the price she paid personally and professionally for her perseverance. While I did get a marvelous treatise from this book on their wild environ, I also got my first introduction to the concept that they are almost-human, maybe even human cousins. I needed background on the great apes so I could show them acting appropriately in their primeval setting tens of thousands of years ago. I read Jane Goodall’s In the Shadow of Man (Houghton Mifflin 1971) years ago as research for a paleo-historic novel I was writing.

In the shadow of a man jane goodall