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Great apes

Shena Guild

Wednesday, 11th June 2008

Shena Guild travels to Tanzania to visit our closest living relatives

Chimpanzee behaviour has been found by many studies to be so similar to ours that we thought we would take our four ‘monkeys’ to see just how much they had in common with their closest relations in the wild. We would be travelling to the far northwestern corner of Tanzania, to Gombe Stream National Park. Jane Goodall arrived here in 1960 to set up a groundbreaking research project into chimpanzees for the famous anthropologist Louis Leakey. He was committed to proving that Homo sapiens had evolved from hominids and shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees.

Our first stop was Kigoma, three hours’ flight from Dar es Salaam. Here, remoteness has left the African way of life intact — the only traffic was chickens and goats. From Kigoma we headed north in a traditional long boat up Lake Tanganyika. This vast freshwater lake runs the length of the Great Rift Valley which is generally regarded as the place where ancient geological upheavals forced the evolution of what became Homo sapiens. After a four-hour journey we arrived at Gombe Tented Camp, where haute cuisine and four-poster beds with all the associated luxuries awaited us.

The next day it was just a five-minute boat ride to the national park. As we entered the rainforest the researchers, who constantly track the chimpanzees, radioed our guide with their location. They were close. A few minutes later we stopped in our tracks. Just metres away was a group of about 20 animals. They were much bigger and more imposing than we expected — adults standing four feet tall — and far removed from the familiar ‘tea party’ chimpanzees in the Tetley ads. It was a scary moment, but our guide reassured us. ‘This is the longest-running research programme involving a wild animal population and the chimpanzees here are so used to humans they think of us as part of the furniture.’ Most people, he explained, do not realise how different chimpanzees are from monkeys, nor how similar they are to humans. Not surprising perhaps, given that they share 98 per cent of our genes and, like us, are members of the great ape family.

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