Primatologist Dr. Craig Stanford on Working With Jane Goodall, His Most Shocking Discoveries and Being Attacked by a Chimp

The post Primatologist Dr. Craig Stanford on Working With Jane Goodall, His Most Shocking Discoveries and Being Attacked by a Chimp appeared first on A-Z Animals.

Dr. Craig Stanford is a leading primatologist whose research has transformed how we understand great apes and their world. As a professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at the University of Southern California (USC), he’s spent decades studying primate behavior — particularly chimpanzee hunting strategies — and even worked alongside the legendary Jane Goodall. A prolific author, Dr. Stanford’s work extends beyond academia to published works, offering us insight into the social and ecological complexities of wild chimpanzees. These days, his work also extends to reptile conservation, but his contributions to primatology continue to shape the field. So, what has he learned from a lifetime of studying our closest biological relatives? Let’s dive in.

What inspired your career in primatology?

I grew up wanting to study animals — to do a sort of Indiana Jones/Charles Darwin life. I was never really interested in primates; I was interested in all sorts of other animals, including reptiles, which is how I gravitated back to that. As an undergrad at a small college, I just happened to have a professor who did primates. That inspired me; I ended up going to graduate school for that at Berkeley. 

Initially, I did a master’s at Rutgers (I’m from New Jersey), and my professors there were both Berkeley PhDs. They said, “You shouldn’t be here. The best program in the world is at Berkeley. You should apply.” I applied and, to my surprise, got accepted. That was the start of my career.

When did your career really gain momentum?

Most people who know me as a primatologist know me for my work with Jane Goodall and chimpanzees many years ago. A lot of books and articles came out of that. Then, I worked with mountain gorillas and chimpanzees. That all began because I was living in India as a graduate student, studying monkeys and doing a thesis on a particular monkey species and their behavioral ecology. I wrote letters to several leading lights in my field, but not names you would know, except for Jane Goodall. I randomly wrote to Goodall also, thinking she’d never respond, and she was the only person who responded. She invited me to work with her, which changed the course of my career. I spent six years living with her and working in Tanzania in the ’90s. In the 2000s, I spent nine years doing a project on gorillas and chimps in Uganda.

Speaking of Jane Goodall, she famously challenged longstanding views on animal behavior. How did working with her shape your perspective on primate intelligence and social structures?

To be honest, I wasn’t with her in person all that much because she’s been on a whirlwind, worldwide mission for decades to save the planet, talk about ethics, and be a good member of society and protector of the environment. My inspiration was just knowing what she’d done. Whenever she did come to Gombe, her site in Tanzania, we spent time together in the field and shared the house.

She was a scientist in the 1960s, but after that, she’s been more of a social and environmental activist. She showed me the kinds of things you can do if you devote yourself to activism. I’ve been in the nonprofit world for the last 15 years or so of my life, and we buy land all over to create wildlife sanctuaries. That’s how she really inspired me — that as an individual, you can still do your part to save the planet.

What are the most significant conservation challenges facing primates today?

The biggest threat is always habitat loss. People are still cutting the forest down, degrading it by lumbering. In the future, great apes will live mainly — if not only — in protected areas like national parks. We want to ensure those national parks are protected, meaning that people aren’t randomly going in and cutting down trees and hunting. Many parts of the world are parks on paper but not in reality. 

Also, there’s an attempt to change the culture in West and Central Africa, where people eat great apes. Chimps and gorillas are still major items in the diets of some people. They’re a delicacy that people serve at fancy dinner parties — smoked gorilla meat. Changing that culture is difficult because it’s no different than trying to persuade North Americans not to eat lobster anymore or turkey on Thanksgiving. We’ve made some progress, but there’s still a long way to go. The bottom line is that there are 8 billion people on the planet and maybe 300,000 great apes.

Our numbers are increasing; their numbers are decreasing.

You’ve spent decades studying chimpanzees and other primates. What is something people would be surprised to learn about your work?

People are always surprised that you can go into a forest in Africa, where these wild animals live — particularly ones that have been accustomed and habituated to people — and you can sit a few yards away and watch them and so quickly tell one individual from another, even when the observation conditions are not very good. Even if you go to the zoo, people often look at the chimps and say, “They all look alike; how do you tell them apart?” But you can learn to recognize faces — it’s pretty much the same cognitive skill we use to recognize each other.

People are also often shocked at the level of commonality they have with chimps. The life cycle of a chimp is not that different than our life cycle. The range of emotions is not that different from the range of emotions we see in ourselves. Goodall was really the first person to point that out in the ’60s, and people kind of doubted her. They thought she was anthropomorphizing, which we all accept today. It’s just a modern extension of those early observations that she made.

What aspects of primate behavior offer the most insight into our evolutionary past?

We’re trying to understand the range of likely possibilities for what our ancestors were like — we never want to look at chimps as under-evolved people. A lot of people think they’re just primitive humans in some way. But they’re on their own evolutionary paths, just as we are. 

We look at chimps and get clues for everything from aggression, dominance, status-seeking, and jealousy to sexuality, diet, cooperation, and mother-infant bond. Every range of topics an anthropologist might study in humans is something we try to study in chimps. 

Obviously, their culture exists at a simpler level. But after 65 years of research, we now have a good sense of the cultural traditions that chimps have. They employ many traditions of making and using tools from natural materials. They also have cultures of doing things they clearly learn by watching each other. And if you go 50 miles down the road to some other forest, the chimps there are doing things a little bit differently — whether it’s how they groom each other or some of their hand gestures. There are these little, trivial cultural differences that are learned, not genetic. They’re different from one population to another, the same way that if you were to go to India, you would see people with the same traditions — weddings, funerals, etc. — but they do them differently because of different learned traditions. 

We even have examples of actual dialects. Chimps have their own language that they use in the wild. It’s not a spoken language, of course, but it’s gestural and vocal. And we have evidence of them also having dialects from one forest to another.

The more complicated an animal is, and the bigger its brain, the less it relies on what’s been hardwired in by genetics, and the more it relies on what’s learned during its upbringing and socialization. Chimps are, of course, the smartest animals on the planet besides us, so they’re all about the information they have to absorb and learn. That makes them who they are.

What is one of the most surprising behaviors you’ve observed in the field or the wild?

When I worked in Tanzania with Goodall, my research was about hunting and meat eating. First of all, I was surprised at the amount of meat-eating they do. I began the research because articles mentioned that chimps ate meat. That wasn’t that interesting because, obviously, our ancestors began eating meat at some point, too. But I discovered they ate much more meat than we realized, and I was always blown away by their tactics and strategies.

Males do the hunting; it’s a very gender-stereotypical thing. They mainly hunt monkeys, and they get bitten. They get counter-attacked sometimes. And they use these clever tactics to get past the male monkeys that protect the group to grab a baby or female monkey that they then intend to eat and share with the other chimps.

They’re very shrewd hunters, and they plan what they do.

What is the most unexpected experience you’ve encountered while conducting field research?

In the early days of my research, when I was working with Goodall’s chimps, I was attacked by one of the chimps named Frodo. He was a big male chimp who everybody knew was kind of aggressive to people. He was aggressive to Jane Goodall herself, sometimes, but he never had a history of doing anything with intent to harm. It seemed like he was bullying to show who was boss.

But he attacked me, and I was very lucky I wasn’t hurt. I rolled down a hill, and he cracked a large tree, but it didn’t land on me. It landed next to me, which was very lucky. I went back to camp that night a little shaken and told my fellow researchers about it. I don’t think anybody believed me. The next day, a visiting researcher in the same spot in the National Park had exactly the same scenario play out. Frodo attacked him and knocked a tree over next to him. We realized that we had to be careful. 

In general, I like to do my research alone. Sometimes we had field assistants with us who were trackers, but I love to be alone. There is some risk involved when you’re alone because the Gombe field site in the National Park is rocky and cliffy. You don’t want to be sitting next to a cliff when there’s a particularly aggressive chimp that you’re sitting a few yards away from. The most challenging part of working with a wild animal in the middle of Africa is dealing with all of the isolation — both physical and psychological. The effort to do that differs greatly from what anybody experiences in the laboratory. But being attacked by a chimp was probably the most memorable thing.

Primates are highly intelligent and socially complex. How do you balance scientific objectivity with the emotional connection that forms during a long-term study?

That’s always an issue, and the more complicated an animal is, the more difficult it is to detach yourself from it intellectually. 

For instance, occasionally, when a female chimp gives birth, the baby is stillborn and doesn’t survive infancy. The mother will carry that baby’s body for days or weeks, a month even. It’s absolutely gut-wrenching to see because she absolutely doesn’t want to give up this baby. She needs to get closure. At some point, she will just let the baby go. That period of mourning or separation anxiety is always really tough. I have three kids who are now adults, but when I was in Africa those years, I only had one child, and she was a toddler. I was always vicariously watching moms and their babies in the chimp world and thinking about my own daughter. So, when stuff happened involving baby chimps, it was difficult.

If you could solve one unanswered question about primates in your lifetime, what would it be?

There are a lot of questions. When we do research over 50 years, people are like, “Well, how much more do you need to do before you answer all the key questions?” But like anything else, the more answers you solve, the more questions you ask because you get to a more sophisticated level. 

If some intergalactic anthropologist came to earth to study humanity and settled in with your family for 50 years, how much would they really know about humanity just by understanding three generations of your family? We’re diverse, and it would take centuries to truly understand what humans are all about if you’re not human. 

Chimps have a very complicated social system. They don’t live in groups like gorillas. They don’t live in herds. Chimps live in a system we call fission-fusion. They live in this kind of fluid society, where they’re constantly unpredictably separating and coming together in temporary groups of two, five, 30, 50. Understanding how that works is still beyond us. We know it has to do with food and sex. But we don’t have all the answers. Basically, the fundamental question of what their whole society and social network is about is a bottom-line question that many people have studied, and we don’t have all the answers yet.

The post Primatologist Dr. Craig Stanford on Working With Jane Goodall, His Most Shocking Discoveries and Being Attacked by a Chimp appeared first on A-Z Animals.