In 1960, she witnessed a group of chimpanzees eating a bushpig, doing away with the previous belief that chimps were strictly vegetarians. That same year she made the startling observation that chimps strip the bark from twigs and use the denuded stick to fish for termites in rotting logs—overturning the even more closely held belief that humans are the only animal to use tools.
Chimps, she discovered, mirror humans in other, decidedly less benign ways. From 1974 to 1978 she observed what she dubbed “the four year war,” an extended, bloody conflict between two groups of rival chimpanzees in Gombe—groups she called the main Kasakela group and the Kahama splinter group. That same year she observed cannibalism among chimpanzees, when a mother and daughter pair stole, killed, and ate babies in their own community—likely to eliminate a line of rival females.
But Goodall discovered a gentle side to chimpanzees too. They play, they tickle, they kiss, they grieve. They make submissive, gestural apologies after a quarrel. And, in powerful moments of cross-species care, they sometimes accepted her—the quiet, comparatively hairless, human observer—as part of their band.
