BOOK REVIEW / SCIENCE : ...

In the 1960s, just as the modern science of primatology was taking shape, the American public became familiar with the lives of a handful of wild chimpanzees through televised National Geographic specials and through the now classic writing of animal behaviorist Jane Goodall.

Since then, Africa and the chimpanzee community that Goodall described at Gombe, Nigeria, have changed mightily. Civil wars, tourism and a human population explosion have altered the political and physical terrain. They have also endangered remaining wildlife populations, including chimpanzees that survive in an increasingly limited forest habitat.

It is impossible to measure Goodall’s contribution to primate studies. She inspired generations of students to study apes in the wild and encouraged research among captive chimps in zoos and research colonies, all the while waging war against inhumane conditions in some laboratories and circuses.

She is also partially responsible for these very different books: “Chimpanzee Travels” and “Chimpanzee Cultures.” Dale Peterson began his travelogue after planning a book project with Goodall in 1989. The collaboration led to two extended trips to east, west and central Africa so he could educate himself about “the hairy apes with thumbs on their feet.”

Travelers, Peterson warns us self-consciously in his opening chapter, tend to exaggerate their experiences. They can also be, he demonstrates by repeated reappearances of a stereotypical ugly American, dreadful bores.

Traveling can be easy. Travel writing, on the other hand, is not. Just how much of themselves should writers include, and how much additional material from others presumably more expert than themselves?

Readers familiar with the sign-language experiments with chimps in Oklahoma in the ‘60s and ‘70s may welcome information about the fates of many of the individual chimps they had come to know. They will learn about a Gombe that is no longer as remote as it seemed in 1960. Today, for instance, wild chimpanzees routinely feed at a banana station where trackers check up on them.

Penny-wise travelers will note how Peterson made his frugal way across frontiers from zoos to research stations by virtue of letters of introduction explaining his interest in chimpanzees. They may or may not sympathize with his limited spirit of adventure and limited interaction with animals. For while Peterson is always on the trail of chimpanzees, he does not often find them. His travelogue is really about his preparations to write a different book.

Goodall also figures in “Chimpanzee Cultures,” a collection of scientific papers that grew out of a 1991 symposium on chimpanzee behavior held at the Chicago Academy of Sciences. But where Peterson’s book is casual and anecdotal, this four-editor tome is serious stuff. In a foreword and a postscript, Goodall sums up three decades of scientific research, concluding with a dismal report on the state of chimpanzee populations.

In 1960, Goodall, alone, studied a single chimpanzee population. Today groups of researchers are making comparative studies of different populations of chimpanzees, bonobos--a subspecies in Zaire--and human beings. Others, in this volume, compare chimpanzees in the wild to captives in research centers.

Today’s scientists use computer analysis of data and DNA studies of individual animals in ways undreamed of a generation ago. A new sense of urgency pervades this work. The big challenge Goodall faced 35 years ago was how to get the large chimp population used to human watchers. Today’s big challenge is the preservation of these animals in dwindling forests in countries where people are suffering from war, famine and disease.

All of the contributors to “Chimpanzee Cultures” fear for these creatures who are closer genetically to humans than they are to any other primate.

This is underscored in the “Cognition” section of “Chimpanzee Cultures.” In one paper Tetsuro Matsuzawa describes a group of chimpanzees at a site in Bossou, Guinea, where the chimps use stones as a hammer and anvil to open nuts. Matsuzawa describes observations he made of 18 animals during three dry seasons.

He delineates the relationships between individual animals, their handedness and the critical period when they learn nut-cracking skills. Then he contrasts chimpanzee learning with tests of human children who were provided with the same nuts and stones as the chimps. The results pose intriguing questions about how chimpanzees are similar to human beings, and how they are different.

Peterson also visited Bossou. He describes seeing the stone “tools” left in place by the chimps, and although he does not see any chimps the day he visits, he is impressed.

Both books remind us that besides having thumbs on their feet and the capacity to learn to use tools and communicate with humans, chimps are remarkable and lovable in themselves. They are so like humans that they have much to teach us, and it is our tragedy, too, if we let them disappear.

To prevent this, visit the chimpanzees at the zoo, read about them when you can, and, above all, help Goodall and her legions preserve their way of life.