Jane Goodall's Inspiration | StarTalk

Back in the 1960s, Jane Goodall, with no formal training in science at the time. I mean, holding aside her four-year-old exploits. The fact is, in the real world, people look, well, what's your resume? Where did you get your degrees in science? She had no formal training in science and she went alone into the Tanzanian jungle to study chimpanzees.

Which, by the way, had never been done before. So I asked her how and why she found herself on that path, without having any science background at all? Certainly not anthropology. Let's check it out. So in the 1960s, there's of course, we're in the Cold War, we're going to the moon, and you're thinking about chimps. I'm desperately trying to get into their world and find out about them.

If no one had really done that before, then you're not following in anyone's footsteps. No, and my mentor, Dr. Lewis Leakey, you know, paleontologist, spent his life searching for the remains of the earliest humans in Africa. So not even he is looking for chimps. Or he's looking for something en route to humans.

His argument was, OK, about 60 million years ago, there's an ape-like, human-like creature, and if you uncover a fossil of an early human, you can tell an awful lot from the muscle attachment, from the wear on the teeth, from the tools associated with their living. So you can learn a lot about the behavior, social behavior. That doesn't fossilize.

So his theory was if Jane sees behavior that's similar or the same between chimpanzees today and humans today, perhaps that same behavior was brought by humans and by chimps along a long evolutionary journey, and originated in that ape-like, human-like creature. That's why he sent me out to Gombe. But he didn't know anything about the field work. He just sent me off on my own to go and find out about the chimps.