A Hairy Mirror

IN THE SHADOW OF MAN by Jane van Lawick-Goodall. 297 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $10. "I saw a black shape hunched up on the ground. I hunched down myself . . . in the thick undergrowth. Then I heard a soft hoo to my right. I looked up and saw a large male directly overhead. All at once he uttered a long drawn-out wraaaai . . . one of the most savage sounds of the African forest ... I forced myself to appear uninterested and busy, eating some roots from the ground. The end of the branch above me hit my head. With a stamping and slapping of the ground a black shape charged through the undergrowth ... I expected to be torn to pieces. I do not know how long I crouched there before I realized that everything was still and silent again, save for the drip-drip of the raindrops."

With this scene of primeval terror, a young Englishwoman named Jane Goodall began an intimacy with the chimpanzees in the rain forests of Tanzania that has lasted a decade and produced one of natural history's most impressive field studies. In this book she has greatly expanded the preliminary report on her experiences, My Friends: The Wild Chimpanzees (1967); the photographs speak a volume in themselves. In the Shadow of Man should become an instant animal classic.

Scary Scrapes. Jane was 26 and a scientific nonentity when she began her work. Born in London in modest circumstances, she worked as a secretary when she arrived in Nairobi. Struck by her feeling for animals, Africa's worldrenowned paleontologist, Dr. L.S.B. Leakey, wangled a grant and packed the young lady off to chase chimps. At first she could not get within 500 yards of her subjects. Real discoveries started, however, when a bold chimp she called David Graybeard strolled into her camp one day and began chewing on a palm nut. Lured by bananas, his friends followed. Jane in turn followed the band on its jungle journeys--sometimes, despite scary scrapes with leopards, she even stayed with them all night--and gathered impressive evidence that the chimpanzee has a far more complex life-style than anybody had supposed.

Like men, she quickly discovered, chimpanzees are technological animals. They chew leaves to make sponges, which they use to sop water out of hollow branches. They also strip grass stems to make long probes, which they use to fish tasty termites out of their mounds. Jane also found out that chimps, long considered vegetarians, also eat meat. Like primitive humans, they form hunting parties and carry out fairly intricate plans to capture young bush pigs, monkeys, baboons--and even, she reports, human babies.

Prodigies of imagination. Compared with the behavior of any species except man, the chimp's social life is richly sophisticated. They have a wide range of intelligible expressions: fear, rage, hunger, shock, confusion, boredom, irritation, amusement, worry, pleading, mischief, tenderness, embarrassment--even a look of comic alarm that reminded Jane of refined English girls watching horror movies. The chimps also smile, hold hands, dance when it rains, play simple games and stage hugging-and-backslapping orgies when they discover a new fruit tree.

Status is important to both sexes, but among the males it seems to matter as much as food, perhaps more than sex. The struggle to achieve it calls forth prodigies of creative imagination. Mike, a low-ranking male of unremarkable physique, seized supreme power in his group by a stroke of genius. He grabbed a couple of empty kerosene cans from the author's camp and then charged at the other males, bellowing ferociously and banging the cans together as he came. Appalled by the din, his rivals fled. Swaggering absurdly, Mike challenged Goliath, the dominant male, and in a drama of display and roaring counterdisplay he broke the older male's nerve. After that, whenever the two met, they rushed up to each other like a couple of rival jocks and worked off their anxiety by hugging, slapping, grooming--and kissing each other on the neck. "Never, however," the author reassures us, "have we seen anything that could be regarded as homosexuality in chimpanzees."

On the whole, in fact, sex was the least serious problem in a chimpanzee's relations. Total promiscuity was the rule, but now and then a male developed a platonic passion for a special female and followed her everywhere, whether or not she was in heat. Sometimes his feeling was returned, and in that case something like a chimpanzee marriage was made. At times sexual fidelity was a part of the contract. At the other extreme, one of the dominant males would sometimes try to assemble a harem. At the first opportunity, the females usually flew the coop.

A Model Mother. Most females were more interested in children than they were in males. Jane found that chimp mothers who made their babies get out on their own at an early age wound up with clinging, frightened children. Steady, loving and even indulgent mothers, in contrast, generally had happy, independent offspring. Flo, a perfectly hideous old chimp who for reasons beyond human imagination made all the males go ape at mating season, was a model mother when the study began. She played with her babies continually, picked them up at the first whimper, followed every slap with a squeeze and cleverly distracted her child when she saw misbehavior in the making; but as she grew older she became grandmotherly and spoiled one little chimp rotten. As he approached maturity, he was still a screaming ninny.

Unlike Sunday Darwins like Robert Ardrey (African Genesis), Jane van Lawick-Goodall does not press the homosimian parallels or insist that psychocosmic mysteries can be solved by watching a bunch of monkeys in a tree. Yet the parallels are strong, and so is the reader's temptation to see in the chimpanzee a hairy mirror of mankind. A woman as well as a scientist, Jane loves her subjects and makes the reader love them too--not as clever pets but as serious and struggling individuals. All the more painful, then, to be told that throughout Africa chimpanzees are being shot for the pot by natives and pursued by professional hunters who knock off the mothers and ship the babies to zoos and laboratories. To one who has read this book, the fact that people kill chimpanzees seems only slightly less sickening than the fact that people kill people.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.