Jane

Front Row at the Movies by Shirrel Rhoades

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First, let’s clarify that apes are not monkeys. Apes are a branch of tailless anthropoid primates native to Africa and Southeast Asia. Like humans, they are hominoids.

While that does not necessarily make us “a monkey’s uncle,” British primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist Jane Goodall treats chimpanzees and gorillas like family. She has closely studied chimpanzees since going to Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park in 1960 under the sponsorship of archaeologist Louis Leakey.

The former Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall, her scientific research among the Kasakela chimpanzee community challenged two long-standing beliefs of the day: that only humans construct and use tools, and that chimps are vegetarians.

In 1977, she established the Jane Goodall Institute which supports her research. With nineteen offices, the Institute undertakes community-centered conservation programs around Africa. In 2004 she was named a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

Now filmmaker Bret Morgen has made a documentary about Jane Goodall. Simply called “Jane,” it is still playing at Tropic Cinema.

“Jane” tells the story of how a young untrained woman challenged the male-dominated scientific community, revising our understanding of the natural world. The film focuses on “her groundbreaking field work, her relationship with cameraman and husband Hugo van Lawick, and the chimpanzees that she studied.”

To accomplish this, Morgen drew on previously unseen footage from the vaults of National Geographic. But despite all this archival footage, the real treat is “meeting” today’s 83-year-old Jane Goodall.

She has devoted her life to studying chimpanzees. And to think, it all came about because as a child her parents gave her a stuffed toy chimp. That toy still sets on the dresser in her second home in London.

Email Shirrel: srhoades@aol.com