Читать книгу Anthropology For Dummies - Cameron M. Smith - Страница 91

A great deal of what anthropology currently knows about the apes has come from long-term field studies carried out by some remarkable women. Jane Goodall began as a student of anthropologist Louis Leakey, who encouraged her to study the chimpanzees to better understand humanity. She did and for 45 years has observed these primates in great detail at a research station at Gombe, Tanzania. Recently Goodall has shifted from studying the chimpanzees to advocating for protection of chimpanzee habitat; like the other apes, the chimpanzee is endangered.

Another great ape, the orangutan of Borneo, has been studied for more than 30 years by Biruté Galdikas of Canada’s Simon Fraser University. Like Goodall, today Galdikas argues forcefully for protection of orangutan habitat, which is being deforested at an alarming rate; some estimate that the orangutan will be extinct by 2012. Dian Fossey (who, like Galdikas and Goodall, was also inspired by Louis Leakey) studied gorillas for nearly three decades, but she was murdered under mysterious circumstances in 1985, and today the gorilla is also becoming extinct, facing the deforestation of its habitat as well as a threat from the Ebola virus. For more on the extinction of primates, see the section “Primates Today (But For How Long?)” later in the chapter.

One of the most important things these women did was to study apes in the wild — not in zoos; you can imagine how different ape behavior would be in these situations. Remember, though, that even the observer’s presence would effect ape behavior, so rather than saying they were observing wild apes, anthropologists say they were studying habituated apes, apes that were accustomed to seeing human observers. Exactly what effects the observers have on ape behavior in non-zoo settings is debatable, but it’s very likely to be more “natural” than zoo behavior.