On July 12, 1969, Ruth Davis, a young American volunteer at Dr. Jane Goodall’s research site in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania, left camp to follow a chimpanzee into the forest. Six days later, her body was found floating at the base of a high waterfall. What happened? Drawing on his recent book, The Ghosts of Gombe, Dale Peterson will delve into the full story of day-to-day life at Gombe during the months preceding Ruth’s death. These months were marked by stress, excitement, social conflicts, cultural alignments, and the friendships that developed among three of the researchers and some of the chimpanzees.
Dale Peterson, Author
Lecture and Book Signing. Presented by Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology and Harvard Museum of Natural History
Recorded November 29, 2018
Transcript
[00:00:07.43] Dale Peterson lectures in English at Tufts University. He got his PhD in English at Stanford in 1977. Went on to become a lecturer there for a bit, and he might have carried on doing what he did forever for first few years after he graduated and became a lecturer, namely working in computers. He wrote a series of books about computing. He was a consultant for the People's Computer Company, and tells me he, at one time, was palling up with Steve Jobs, I believe.
[00:00:48.31] But in the 1980s, as he says in the preface to his book The Deluge and the Ark, "I first became interested in primates one day a few years ago when my wife showed me a newspaper article." And in that newspaper article, there was a description of the population of muriquis, woolly spider monkeys, in the Atlantic coast forests of Brazil declining to 350 individuals. And instead of just recording his sadness, Dale decided to do something about it, and he got in touch with-- I think it was Karen Strier. Is that right? No, someone else.
[00:01:34.57] At any rate, Karen Strier from Harvard had started studying muriquis. And Dale got in touch with one of the people involved and offered help with their conservation. And that led to him, first of all, writing a brochure to help with the conservation and raising money for that species, but then to write a very important book, The Deluge and the Ark, in which he reviewed the conservation status of a number of primates, and indeed took a journey around the world and visited 12 of the threatened primates. And that led into tonight, because what it led to was a career involved in thinking about and writing about the lives of primates and the people who studied them.
[00:02:24.58] In 1993, only four years after writing The Deluge and the Ark, Dale had got in touch with Jane Goodall to the point where he wrote a book called Visions of Caliban, which very much documented what Jane Goodall and various other people working with chimpanzees were doing. Ultimately, that led, 13 years later, to his extraordinary biography of Jane Goodall that is available just along there, The Woman Who Redefined Man. And alongside that, by the way, Dale produced two edited versions of Jane Goodall's letters which are fascinating, a tremendous resource for anybody interested in the development of primatology. He didn't stick to just that kind of approach. His interest in conservation took him to writing a book on the bushmeat crisis, Eating Apes in 2003. He got really involved with thinking about the cognitive and emotional lives of animals. He wrote a book called The Moral Lives of Animals in 2011.
[00:03:33.61] Along the way, he wrote a book about elephants, and along the way, he wrote a book about giraffes. And by the way, with his interest in natural history writing, he has instituted, initiated, and developed a prize for natural history writing called the Thoreau Prize, which has become quite an important institution. So it's wonderful to have a specialist in writing taking on the description of the primate and the primatology world. I was reminded of this a little bit when last year, he and I went to see the movie Jane, which I hope everyone here has seen because that, in many ways, heralds the kind of thing that we see in this book, The Ghosts of Gombe. Both of them recapture an era that is all too roundly described, an era of a type that's all too roundly described. Namely, the strange and exciting world of an isolated field camp where basic discoveries are being made.
[00:04:47.59] In The Ghosts of Gombe, it's more than that. It's a detective story as well. But how exciting it is that someone with Dale's talents has devoted themselves to describing something that no one else has really done, the development of primatology, and particularly, through the eyes of Jane Goodall. Dale, it's a pleasure to have you here. Thank you very much.
[00:05:14.18] [APPLAUSE]
[00:05:19.54] Thank you, Richard. I have to say, you've said so much about my experience that you've probably cut my talk short by 10 minutes, but that's fine. You didn't mention that you and I have co-authored a book called Demonic Males - Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, which 25 years later is still in print and doing well. And thank you, everyone else. Thank you all for coming here. Thank you, Jeff, for introducing Richard, and also Diana Munn and Jane Pickering of the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. It's great to be here, and you've all braved the cold weather to come out.
[00:06:16.27] Richard, you know, talked a bit about the origin of this book. I'll talk a little bit more about it. The ghosts in the title I may have to explain. There are actual ghosts. I don't mean ghosts of the ectoplasmic kind, but hauntings. At least a couple of people have reported having hallucinations or visions of Ruth, the young woman who died on the left. And the book is, at its core, a book about a young woman who died and the tragedy of that. It was a violent death that happened at Jane Goodall's research site in the summer of 1969. Ghosts is also, for me, a metaphor, and it's a metaphor about alienation, and that's probably a more complex subject within the book, but it's alienation between people and between species. If you read the book, that might make more sense than it does now.
[00:07:29.44] The Gombe part of the title is in East Africa, and it is also a consequence of a great violence that happened geologically, basically the tectonic shifts of various African plates in eastern Africa. And in the last 25 million years, there has been a separation of plates on the dotted line there, and it's the famous East African Rift system. It's complicated, but part of the system opened up and created a couple of lakes. One of them is Lake Tanganyika, which is the second deepest freshwater lake in the world. It's 420 miles long, 31 miles wide on average, so it's quite a substantial body of water even though it may not seem like it from this picture. I've actually been on the lake, and one of the things about it is you get storms that are like ocean storms. So you know, it's an inland sea.
[00:08:52.17] The other thing about the lake is that the plate on the eastern half has been uplifted over the last 25 million years and created this impressive escarpment here. Now, left is north and right is south, but this is actually the boundary of what is now Gombe Stream National Park, and you can get some sense here of the extreme ruggedness of the terrain. The high plateau above you is 2,000 feet above the lake. And so along with that 25 million years of splitting of these plates, there was this uplift, and then many million years of erosion creating very, very deep and very rugged ravines within Gombe Park. There are about 12 streams, more or less, running down that escarpment down to the lake, and each of the streams has carved out its own deep valley. One of the streams to the far south is called Gombe Stream. And for reasons that I don't think anybody living knows, that's the name of a larger ecosystem, Gombe Stream, now Gombe Stream National Park.
[00:10:24.67] It's a bit of a paradox that all of that geological violence forming Gombe Stream actually wound up protecting this area from anthropomorphic violence over the last few centuries so that it's been preserved as a remarkable habitat of wilderness. And it was preserved probably just because of the ruggedness, just very, very difficult to get into, to navigate around. There were lots of poisonous snakes. But it's also probably true that the local people, the Waha who have lived there for a few hundred years consider Gombe, this area, to be an abode of their earth spirits who are dangerous, so it was also protected by human culture in earlier times. And when the Germans came and claimed much of East Africa as their own, they defined this area as the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve, only they did that in German. The Brits who took over after World War I and were given this part of East Africa as a mandate named it Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve. So they simply changed the German to English, and it became a national park in the '60s.
[00:12:10.14] The other thing that's remarkable about this place is that this is where Jane Goodall did all of her work with chimpanzees. And this is a picture of Jane probably taken in 1963. As you can see, she was a very young woman at the time. And she came there in July of 1960, so she'd been there three years by the time this picture was taken. And at the time that she came to study chimpanzees, the basic wisdom was that you couldn't possibly study chimpanzees because they're far too dangerous. They're violent. They're very powerful, as everybody knows. They're volatile. They'll tear you to pieces. And Jane simply didn't believe that. She also had a sponsor, Louis Leakey, the famous paleoanthropologist who also didn't believe that.
[00:13:17.36] And so Jane had no scientific education whatsoever. She didn't go to college. Her family couldn't afford it, but she had an amazing passion about animals. And she got to meet Louis Leakey and Leakey took her as his secretary and set her up in the first chimpanzee research project of any extent in history. Jane really is a remarkable person. I say is because she's still very much alive. She's 84. And she just showed up and in essence, what she did was she just acted like she wasn't a threat. And the chimpanzees, when they began to recognize she wasn't a threat, began to show themselves to her. And gradually over a year, she became more and more familiar with the individuals. And after a couple of years, she discovered that if she left a banana out in camp, a chimp might come in and take the banana, and here she is handing a banana to a chimpanzee after three years.
[00:14:39.59] It was a remarkable accomplishment. She was the first person to state in a scientific setting that chimpanzees eat meat. And before that moment, the scientific cliche was that all primates are vegetarians. Simply wrong. She was made fun of for that, but it was true. She also discovered chimpanzees making and using tools, simple tools, but that was another discovery that made her, by the time National Geographic published their first article about her in 1963, famous. And when she first came, as she tells people and as she writes about it, obviously the chimpanzees did not show themselves. They were very elusive. And she would climb up to this place, which she calls the peak, and it was an overlook where she could look over some of the rugged valleys and mountains and ridges, and with binoculars, scan the area to find any signs of chimpanzees, usually a characteristic boiling of the trees, or to listen for the sounds of the chimpanzee calls.
[00:16:07.10] One of the things that you might notice about this particular picture is that the Jane here is 25 years older than the Jane in the previous photograph. And I know that just because I know Jane pretty well and I can see the streaks of gray in her hair, and I also know that the person who probably took that photograph. So I'm guessing this photograph was taken in 1988 along with this photograph. Again, Jane 25 years later after she had done her groundbreaking research, but still doing research and still involved in chimpanzee work. And in fact, Gombe today is still operating as a research station. And here's Jane with another person that I got to know, and his name is Geza Teleki. Again, this was taken in 1988. And Geza is interesting for us tonight and interesting for this story because he was the lover of the young woman who died, and he also became my friend.
[00:17:24.80] Richard talked about my involvement with Jane, and he mentioned that yes, I was an English major in college and yes, I got a PhD. I was at Stanford at the same time Jane was, but I think I wouldn't have recognized her if I'd seen her. And if I had met her, I wouldn't have known what to say to her because I didn't know anything about chimpanzees or primates. I was an English major, and I recommend being an English major. I loved it. I loved every second of it. And you know, unlike other majors, you don't necessarily have to acquire a lot of information. What you acquire instead is a skill. You acquire a skill in writing and you acquire a skill in thinking, so one hopes, and sometimes it happens. The downside of being an English major if you get a PhD is if you don't want to be a professor, you're unemployed, which is what happened to me in 1977. And as a result, I became a carpenter wishing in my heart of hearts to be a writer.
[00:18:38.76] I was a carpenter for a couple of years and working on building houses in the Silicon Valley area of northern California. And I worked on Steve Jobs' house and I got to know Steve. And Steve knew that I wanted to be a writer and he was very encouraging and he gave me my first computer, an Apple II. And he gave me a printer, and he said, go to it, Dale. And I did. And so I started my career as a writer writing books about computers. Four books, and then I designed a computer game. And I actually made money and it made me a little arrogant. I thought it was easy and I didn't realize that it's not always easy. But I was arrogant enough that I thought, well I'll write about something I actually care about, and that's where the primates came in. I wanted to write about animals and endangered animals and so I wrote about endangered primates, and that involved traveling around the world, going down the Amazon River in a small boat, crossing Africa in into southern India and Southeast Asia. And that's how I met Jane.
[00:19:55.91] I decided after my first primate book that I wanted to write about chimpanzees, and I was looking for an expert to consult. And as it happened, I read an article in a magazine written by Geza about chimpanzees. So I contacted Geza and said, would you be my consultant? And he said yes. And he said, oh, by the way, would you like to write a book with Jane Goodall? And I said sure. So Jane and I wrote a book together, and that was my introduction really to chimpanzees and also to Jane and also to Geza. So co-authoring a book is a little like getting married. There's a contract involved. There's money involved. There are egos involved, and it can go horribly wrong. You can wind up having an enemy for life. Or alternatively, if the book works out, you can wind up having a lifelong friend. And that's what happened with Jane and me was after the book, we realized we had a lot in common in terms of our thinking. We understood chimpanzees in the same way. And it also was a lifelong friendship with Geza.
[00:21:18.36] Jane had mentioned to me that Geza's girlfriend had died at Gombe, but she didn't say much about it and Geza never talked about it. So even after I wrote the biography, I only knew the basics of how Ruth died. But then in 2006, Geza telephoned me, my old friend, somebody I would always talk to and always respond to. Dale, I need to talk. And as a result, I went down from my home here to Washington DC where Geza lived, and basically I became his therapist. Geza had actually had the-- I mentioned the ghostly vision. Geza had had a hallucination of Ruth, and he had started, in that year, beginning to open up all of the boxes that he had closed, the mental boxes and the boxes of her letters. And all of the memory he had of Ruth, he began looking at it again, and this was a result of a letter that he had gotten by somebody who asked why Ruth jumped off the cliff.
[00:22:39.85] Ruth's body was found at the base of a high waterfall, but Geza had never believed she had committed suicide and this was extremely upsetting to him. And it was the start of his research, and it was the start of my work as a therapist. I would come down once every two or three months, spend a couple of days with him. He and I would talk, and of course, we both knew that this might make a book, so we tape recorded our conversations, and it did become the core of the book. One of the things that's troubling about it is that it's actually a mystery. You know, we pretty much know that Ruth somehow-- well her body was found at the base of a high waterfall in a pool six days after she had disappeared. Her skull was crushed in.
[00:23:40.96] There are three ways to fall off a cliff. You can fall accidentally, you can jump, or you can be pushed. And Geza had begun thinking about all three possibilities, and that was driving him nuts. It was disturbing him profoundly and it was the beginning of the book. In some ways, I wrote the book as a mystery story, and there are mysteries to it. Nobody saw her or nobody reported seeing her jump or fall. Nobody was around. The presumption was it was an accident, but we know she was depressed. We know that from some of her letters, that she was not feeling well. We also know she basically hated most people that she was in camp with. And there's also other things that were more troubling. One was 10 days before she disappeared and died, she wrote a letter to Geza. Geza was not at Gombe at the time. He was back in the States facing down his draft board. She wrote a letter 10 days before he died saying, I really don't care about any of the people here. The only thing I care about is the welfare of the chimps. And when that is threatened, I will fight to the death literally. And that's a quote. So fight to the death literally is a pretty striking thing to say 10 days before you die.
[00:25:25.47] The other troubling thing was that when Geza and I began looking into this-- you know, the Gombe has lots of records. There were records taken daily and every researcher made records usually every five minutes of what they were doing. So there were tremendous amounts of records about what was going on there. If people walked into the forest, they made a map of where they had gone. And one of the things that Geza started to discover was that the records about Ruth were missing, particularly in the couple of months before she died. Ruth also had a journal, a diary that she kept up every night. She typed a couple of pages every night, single spaced, so it was a very important document. That disappeared. But for me, the more troubling thing was where did the gap in the records come from? The records are still preserved. There are archives at Duke University, and they're now digitized. But you'll go to page, you know, 579 and then 580 is missing. And that's the area where you would expect to see something about Ruth. So there's this strange anomaly. It really looked like an intentional erasure in the records.
[00:26:53.89] So that's the mystery that I worked on and I think I've solved it. I'm not going to tell you what the solution is. You'll have to buy the book, but I'll give some hints. I will tell you the way I tried to deal with this problem, what happened to Ruth. Here's Geza in 1988 sitting on Ruth's grave. She was buried at Gombe. The way to deal with the mystery of what happened really, I thought, was to give a full portrait of everything I could find out that went on at Gombe Stream in 1968 and '69 when Geza and Ruth were there. And I figured once I did that and gave a detailed portrait of the place, I would figure out what happened.
[00:27:49.13] So that's the best portrait I have of Ruth, and that was taken probably in 1968. And then Geza and Ruth together at Gombe. Geza was an anthropology student who volunteered as a researcher at Gombe, and he convinced Jane to bring Ruth there because she was a great typist and Jane needed a typist, and Jane also needed a babysitter because she had a baby. And here's another person who is essential to the story, Carole Gale, who was another researcher, a volunteer on the right. And behind her is Hugo van Lawick, Jane's husband, making a film about chimps. And there are a couple of chimps to the left.
[00:28:47.19] One of the things about Gombe was that it was a stressful time, the late '60s. Jane was very, very ambitiously expanding her operation there. Well, at the same time, the National Geographic was ambitiously contracting their support for the project. So they were really running out of money, but Jane is a very energetic and just as simply, very ambitious woman, always has been. And so she was running this research site. She was being a mother with her young baby. Hugo, her husband, was also doing filming and photography in the Serengeti. And they had a home in Nairobi so they were commuting between Nairobi and Gombe and the Serengeti and back again. And they were, at the same time, trying to make Gombe-- change it from the original tented camp, you know, Jane's two tents in the woods, to an actual scientific research station, which they were doing but they did that with volunteers and young scientists.
[00:30:01.89] Here's another picture of Ruth and Geza and a third person who is important in the story, Richard Ransom who was a baboon researcher. And here is-- Tim Ransom, not Richard Ransom. And here's Tim Ransom and his wife Bonnie down at their hut on the beach. So aside from the stress of Jane trying to do too many things-- be a wonderful mother, be a wonderful wife, be a scientist, write books, write papers-- there was the stress of people not getting along in camp. And that was one of the things that I began to learn as I looked into it, was just there were a lot of different perspectives. Carole Gale was what you might call a hippie. She was smoking marijuana, and the people down at the beach, Tim and Bonnie, were also part of the marijuana smoking camp, whereas the camp up where Jane stayed and other researchers stayed knew about it but were shocked by what was going on. So there was tension among the researchers, and it was a continuous problem for those couple of years.
[00:31:28.32] I think it was a bit like putting people in a spacecraft and sending them to Mars. It's this very isolated place at the time. You know, it took two weeks to get the mail. You couldn't phone out. There was no internet of course, but it was also a forced intimacy. So this combination of isolation and intimacy, I think is a recipe for problems. And Jane was very aware of the social problems that were going on. She really was offended by the marijuana smoking, but couldn't stop it. And she brought in a senior scientist, Michael Simpson here, who she had hoped would help bring order out of chaos. But unfortunately, Michael was not really senior to anybody else there. He was about their age, he just happened to have a PhD, and his PhD was on Siamese fighting fish. He was a wonderful person, but he was also very shy, so he just wasn't a fit for that and he did not solve the problem.
[00:32:43.40] There was also an African staff, and I don't get a sense that there was a lot of contention among the African staff. And I think that the relationship between the African staff and the researchers was-- relationships were quite good. And I think the Africans were delighted to have a job in a place where, you know, nobody else had jobs. And many of them stayed for many years. The person on the left, I think is Dominic Bandola, and he was the cook. He was the cook when Jane came in 1960, and he was fired at one point, and then he came back and so he was back. The person next to him is Ferdinand Umpono who was a parks ranger. And in the middle, I believe is Sadiki Rukumata another parks ranger, Hilali Matata, and the person on the far right is Rashid Kikwale who was basically the mzee, the wise person of the group, and also the head of the organization.
[00:34:00.03] And the person I mentioned as Hilali Matata-- I believe that's Hilali sitting down there. I could be mistaken. No, Hilali over there, was the one who Jane had hoped would become a field ranger working with the scientists to help them do their scientific research in the forest. He was not yet trained to do that, so that didn't happen. The camp was also surrounded by fishermen, and this is one of the fishermen, Alphonse. I got to know about him. I never met him myself, but a wonderful person. Most of the fishermen were traditional Waha, and they fished by catching nets. Basically, they were sardine fishermen. But Alphonse was a driftnet fisherman. He came from the south, so he was culturally an outsider, and missing a foot. He lost his foot in a railroad accident. But Alphonse would provide the food for fried fish, and that's Dominic the cook coming down to pick up the fish for everybody's dinner.
[00:35:28.62] The main part of the camp is here, and that big structure on the left is an aluminum prefab. They call it Pan Palace. It's got thatched on the outside, but it's all aluminum. And by the late '60s, those little things that look like I don't know what, flying saucers or something, are actually banana boxes. I'll give you a better view of them. So by the late '60s, the way that they were doing the research was they were attracting chimps into camp with bananas. It makes a lot of sense first if you know Gombe, because Gombe is so extremely rugged that it's very hard for people to get around, secondly if you know chimps because chimps had to have a reason to come into camp. Otherwise, they would just be out in the forest looking for food other places. So it was a good way to keep track of a pretty large group of chimps.
[00:36:32.06] They would put out bananas in these boxes at night. And then during the day, the chimps would come in and they wouldn't know that the bananas came from people. But you know, at a certain point, through electrical wires buried under the ground, the latches would be released and these boxes would magically open, and presto, there would be bananas. And the chimps got to know that so they were coming into camp. And it was a pretty normal-- it was as if the chimpanzees had discovered an amazingly good fruit tree, and the fact that people were around and watching them-- they'd gotten so used to people and they knew people were harmless. They weren't trying to steal the bananas. They weren't attacking chimps, so they just would ignore the people and they would come in.
[00:37:31.61] You know, the mothers would come in with their babies on their backs. This is actually a spoiled baby who's too old to be riding on his mother, and that's a story that Jane's written about. The mother is Flo and the baby is Flint. And this is Mike. Again, people got to know the chimps individually by sight. And Mike is coming into camp. And I'm not sure who this is. I think it might be Charlie, but he's on the roof of the cabin and he's actually pounding on the roof because male chimpanzees are show-offs like male humans, and they like to make a big noise and they like to make a big show of themselves. So here he is with his hair raised up, making him look bigger than he actually is, pounding on the cabin. And people are sleeping inside, theoretically. And then he just says, well I think I'll jump over to that palm tree over there. So this gives you some sense of how incredibly athletic these animals are. They're really impressive and tremendously strong.
[00:38:48.02] And then he grabs a palm front and he goes down to the steel barrel that I think is a water storage barrel, pounds on it to make sure everybody knows he's there. And just to make the point, he then kicks on it. So we humans have NASCAR, and chimps have oil drums to drum on. And then the researchers would come in and if they were lucky, the chimpanzees would simply ignore them, and they would take notes about chimpanzee behavior with a tape recorder, and that's what this person is-- Geza Teleki in 1968 or '69 taking notes. And this is Ruth taking notes. In this case, I don't know if you can see what's going on, but I think the chimpanzee Leakey is mating with Fifi. And Fifi's little brother Flint is rushing over to interrupt because he doesn't like that. And here is Carole also-- I don't know if she's doing research. I don't know exactly what's happening. The chimp in front of her is, I think, yawning.
[00:40:12.79] But often, the chimps would just come down and it was like a picnic. We've got bananas. We'll sit around and socialize with our friends. And so here we have Charlie, Faben, Flo, and little Flint in the front relaxing. And so a lot of the time, it was just a nice social event. We'll sit down and be with our friends. Here's Mike, who was the alpha male at that time, just relaxing lying down. And of course, a bit of grooming, a sign of friendship and support among chimps. This is Goliath grooming Wurzel. And old friends or relatives meeting for the first time in maybe a week, maybe a couple of weeks, are very excited to see each other. A tremendous hug of excitement and pleasure just as people do when they see old friends for the first time in a while. And then play. This is an older male playing with an immature male. I think the older male may be Mike, and it's tickling. And I don't know if you know this, but chimpanzees laugh very clearly when they're tickled and it's a lot of-- it's just kind of amazing to see an animal laugh, but they do laugh.
[00:41:46.81] And then sometimes you get this. And those grimaces are not grimaces of aggression. They are grimaces of fear, I believe, and I think probably a male is making a big show-off and scaring chimps. I'm guessing that's what happened. Richard probably knows better than I do what's happening here. Maybe not. And here, I'll let you think about this one. It's an interesting sequence, and it's a kiss. And it's not an erotic kiss, but a kiss of reassurance. It's OK, don't worry, I'm still your friend. So that was the operation. They were putting out bananas and they were getting lots of chimps coming in, and then the baboons showed up and all of a sudden, things became more complicated.
[00:42:51.34] The baboons discovered the bananas too, and they thought, well this is great, it's a great food source. And the baboons-- chimps are live in what's called a fission fusion society. They disappear. They'll move in small groups. They'll gather in larger groups. Baboons stay in a single troop that's roughly about 50, and they stay with each other all the time. And the males at least can be very intimidating. These male baboons remind me of German Shepherds, except they have enormous fangs. They're not quite the weight of chimps, but they're very threatening. So there was a lot of conflict between chimps and baboons.
[00:43:39.13] So much so that in the summer of 1968, Geza and Carole and Jane got together and said, we have to change the protocol. And what they did was they stopped the banana provisioning except for a couple of days-- once every seven days, once every five days-- and that did discourage the baboons. And the chimps would still come in to check to see if there were bananas. So it was a good thing, but it also meant that a lot of the researchers had time on their hands. Essentially, three researchers who were doing the chimp research. And so they started a second kind of research protocol, which was they started following the chimpanzees in the forest. And they called it-- so then they divided the records into record A, which was everything that happened in camp at the provisioning site, and then record B, which was everything that happened during a follow of a chimp into the forest.
[00:44:43.78] And the follows were really transformative, because people were suddenly leaving the human environment and going into the chimp environment with the chimps. And it just transformed their sense of what was going on, and it brought them quite close to the chimpanzees. And in fact, friendships developed. And it's not that surprising, because we know very well that emotions evolved long before humans evolved. Otherwise, why would you be friends with a dog? So humans share, essentially, pretty much the same emotional system that chimpanzees do. And when they started doing the follows, because the chimpanzees were so much superior to humans in terms of their capacity to move through the forest, the chimpanzees started selecting people they wanted to follow them. So they would let certain people follow them and not let others, and it was very easy to do that. You know, a chimp can just swing on a vine and cross a ravine or just hunch down low and go through a thicket of thorns, and people simply can't do that.
[00:45:58.39] So as a result, this guy-- this is Figan-- became good friends with Carole. And Carol just thought Figan was her favorite chimp along with his brother, Faben, who also-- Carole just really loved Faben. And Faben and Figan liked Carole. Faben is walking up right now because he was crippled by polio in the epidemic of 1966, and he lost the use of one arm, which meant he can't walk on all fours. So he started walking upright like that. This chimp, this is Wurzel, and you can know Wurzel easily from those eyes which are remarkably human-like, and the only difference is a simple genetic anomaly that gives whites to his eyes as humans have. Chimps don't have whites to their eyes mostly, but Wurzel does.
[00:46:57.34] And Wurzel became close to Geza, but Geza's favorite chimpanzee was Leakey, and they became friends. And that's what Geza thought of Leakey, was they were friends. And then there was Hugh, and he was remarkable. He was one of the most powerful males there. You can get some sense of the build on this guy. He was built like an Olympic weightlifter. Very powerful male, very aggressive, hated people, hated women especially. He would throw rocks at them. They were all lucky he didn't just tear them to pieces, but I think chimps just figured humans weren't worth it because they weren't threatening. Somehow Ruth became friends with this guy, and she really developed a real love of Hugh. And Hugh began to accept Ruth and even let Ruth follow where he wouldn't let anybody else follow him, but he would let Ruth do it.
[00:48:07.96] And the relationship actually developed over time to the point that once in March of 1969, Ruth and he were alone in the forest, and Hugh branch shook and beckoned at her. Well, at Gombe, and nowhere else among chimps, but at Gombe, that's a signal, and it's a mating signal. The male says, come with me, my darling. Let's go deeper into the forest and have sex. And Ruth, of course, was shocked and amazed and pleased at that sense of intimacy. But a few weeks later, he did it again. And when she didn't follow his beckon, he grabbed her by the leg and dragged her for 15 feet. And she writes about it with some cheer when she wrote a letter to Geza explaining what happened saying, well I had a little scratch.
[00:49:17.60] And you might think this is terrible, but I think it's remarkable that this chimpanzee knew enough not to hurt her. You know, he obviously-- if she were a chimp, he would have beat her up. Chimpanzees are extremely violently patriarchal. He would have beat her up if she refused to go with him. He just dragged her and then let go. And I think he must have thought, oh, no, I can't do that. She's a human. So it was just a remarkable thing. By that time, Ruth had gotten to know the chimpanzees so well that she understood what was going on with each individual, I think very well, very intuitively. Because chimpanzees can't talk, they can't really talk about their feeling, but they do communicate very much in the way that people communicate which is very, very honestly in terms of facial signaling and in terms of body language. So I think the body language here is promising and not aggressive, curious maybe. And here's another sample of body language among humans.
[00:50:49.52] Anyway, Ruth disappeared on July 12, 1969. This is the main camp here, so we know that she left the main camp around noon on July 12. And they spent six days searching for her, more than 100 people involved including the local police, local schoolchildren, the fishermen, everybody at camp, all of the workers, and they couldn't find her. Carole, who was in bed with malaria during this period, had a vision. That's the word she used when she told me about it. Ruth came into her hut where she was sick and staying sick with malaria, and slammed the door shut-- this was after Ruth had disappeared-- and said, why haven't you come to find me? And then the vision disappeared. And so the next day, Carole got out of bed even though she was still weak from malaria, and she insisted on going with the search parties. And she had a feeling that Ruth had probably traveled all the way this way. And in fact, so Carole went out and followed that route. Nobody had thought to look that far because it's an extremely long distance, and nobody imagined that Ruth was following chimpanzees so far. So most of the research was going on in that valley there, Kakombe Vally, and this is Kahama. Carole found the body, and that's the end.
[00:52:48.85] [APPLAUSE]