in, visibly agitated. He darted straight over to Moseid, grabbed hold of Julius through the bars, yanked him out of Moseid’s arms and pulled him toward the bars. Julius was too big to fit through the bars and so was being squeezed forcefully up against them. Dennis was set to kill his son until Edvard leaned inside the cage, and punched Dennis in the head with all his might. Dennis released Julius and he fell to the floor. In return, however, Dennis grabbed Moseid’s arm and now held it in a tight grip. “Get Julius! Get Julius!” Moseid screamed. Mosvold ran over to scoop up the terrified chimpanzee. Julius was safe, but now Dennis was refusing to release Moseid’s arm. Mosvold tried desperately to loosen his grip on Edvard, kicking the bars and Dennis’s hand. Edvard tried to hit Dennis with his free arm, but Dennis wouldn’t let go. Edvard was afraid the chimpanzee would tear his arm off, something he was physically capable of doing, but Dennis seemed to be most interested in his hand. Edvard clenched his fist as hard as he could, but it wasn’t difficult for Dennis to pry open the fist, finger by finger. Dennis took his time, like a torturer who knows that the waiting and fearful anticipation are more traumatic for the victim than any actual pain. The girls meanwhile were waiting outside in the car, wondering what could be taking their father so long. After Dennis had pried Edvard’s index finger open, he looked at it before sticking it into his mouth and biting it clean off with his razor sharp canine teeth. Edvard howled in shock and pain, Dennis released his hold, and both Moseid and Mosvold fell over backward onto the floor.47
In the same way that Dennis, or possibly one of the other chimps, had bitten off one of Julius’s fingers earlier that year, Dennis had punished and humiliated Edvard according to chimpanzee etiquette, by biting off a finger. Mosvold saw the bone protruding straight out of Moseid’s skin. Edvard rushed around madly, looking for a piece of paper towel to wrap around his hand. Mosvold insisted that someone drive him to the hospital immediately, but Moseid refused, claiming it would be better to first drop his daughters off at their grandparents’ house before going to the doctor. Once in his car, however, the blood drained from his face and he felt dizzy. He finally gave in and allowed someone to drive him to the West Agder Central Hospital.
Julius and Edvard had each lost part of a finger. Like an ironic version of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, they could now point at one another with their bitten-off fingertips. They were now marked for life and forever bound together.
Chapter 3
A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN
“A chimpanzee kept in solitude is not a real chimpanzee at all.” 48
WOLFGANG KÖHLER
DURING JULIUS’S EARLY life, most of our knowledge about wild chimpanzees came from a single human: the British researcher Jane Goodall. Since childhood, Goodall had dreamed of moving to Africa and living among the chimpanzees. She chanced upon just such an opportunity in adulthood when a former schoolmate moved to a farm in Kenya and invited Jane to visit. Once in Kenya, Jane first landed a job as a secretary in Nairobi. However, her interest in chimpanzees eventually led her to cross paths with National Museum paleontologist and anthropologist, Louis Leakey. He was so impressed with the self-taught Jane Goodall that he soon hired her as his own secretary. Leakey allowed Jane to accompany him as he searched for the fossils of prehistoric human species while at the same time putting her skills as a field worker to the test. He was persuaded by what he saw and suggested that Goodall carry out a pioneering study in Tanzania following the wild chimpanzees in the Gombe National Park on Lake Tanganyika over a long period. Her work would provide the research community with the first ever glimpse into the daily lives of wild chimpanzees. The fact that Goodall was self-taught and unschooled on the subject was more of a boon than a disadvantage, Leakey believed. He would secure financial funding, but she would have to find a partner to join her endeavors. On July 16, 1960, Goodall left for a four-month-long research trip together with her mother, Vanna, and a local cook named Dominic.49
The project was both audacious and naïve. Goodall was twenty-six years old, inexperienced, petite, beautiful and blonde. She intended to go around unprotected with her notebook and binoculars in an area populated by wild chimpanzees, leopards, snakes and buffalos. Several weeks passed before she observed a single thing. Both she and her mother came down with serious cases of malaria. But after three months of fieldwork, she made a groundbreaking discovery as the first human ever to observe the use of tools between wild chimpanzees. Leakey had been searching for just such a breakthrough and had explained to her beforehand that an observation like this would justify the entire project. For the first time, Goodall observed and described the manner in which the chimpanzees selected sticks, modified them by removing leaves and adjoining twigs and then proceeded to use them to fish termites out of hollow tree stumps—in other words, the chimps created and used tools. The implications were far-reaching, not only for how one viewed chimpanzees, but also for the very definition of what it means to be human: “Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as humans,” Leakey responded by telegraph after receiving news of the discovery.50 Up until then, humans had been defined as the only creature to use tools, a tone set by the 1949 Kenneth Oakley classic, Man the Tool-Maker. From now on, what it meant to be human would have to be redefined. Goodall’s breakthrough led to renewed funding and an extended period of research work in the field.
After the chimpanzees realized that the strange white female primate with binoculars was no threat to them, Jane Goodall was slowly able to come into closer quarters with them. She began recognizing each one individually and gave them names. She learned to decode the various forms of body language between the chimpanzees, many of them strikingly similar to human gestures such as kissing and embracing, holding hands or patting one another on the shoulder for encouragement. She discovered several ways in which the chimpanzees used tools, such as their tendency to pick leaves and then proceed to chew and crumple them up so that they would become soft and absorbent and useful as sponges to retrieve water from difficult-to-reach holes in tree trunks. Or how they would crack nuts with an assortment of objects, or use leaves to clean themselves off when dirty. The male chimpanzees, in particular, would wash away their semen directly after mating. Goodall eventually got so close to the chimpanzees that she was allowed to touch them, to stroke and groom their fur and to feed them from her hand. Of course, this was extremely risky behavior—the chimpanzees were also at risk of catching contagious diseases to which they were not immune—but Goodall had both faith in God and a solid dose of luck and survived these experiences. She was able to come into closer contact with chimpanzees than any other human before her, in part due to a banana feeding station, which she established in her camp beginning in 1963. This method later received heavy criticism because it influenced and altered the community’s behavior. However, the station made it possible for Goodall to observe how cunning the chimpanzees could be in securing the largest possible number of bananas for themselves. One of the chimpanzees named Figan managed to dupe the others in his group multiple times by pretending to have caught the scent of a promising food source in the forest. He lured the other chimpanzees to investigate the scent with him before abandoning the search party and sneaking back to Goodall’s camp where he knew there would be bananas he could enjoy all to himself.51 In another situation, Goodall set up an experiment in which she placed bananas in boxes that could be opened with a screw and a nut, provided the chimpanzees were able to learn the system. Some of them were successful; others were not. One of the chimps was able to figure out the system quickly and learned to hide his abilities from the others in the group. He would wait until the others were looking in the opposite direction before discreetly opening the box with the screw. After that, he would sit nonchalantly with one hand on the lid without giving off any indication that he had been able to open the lock, all the time waiting until the others would give up and go away so he could eat his bananas in peace.
National Geographic sent the photographer Hugo van Lawick to the Gombe to document the fascinating interplay between the plucky researcher, Goodall, and the wild chimpanzees. The result was a storybook ending. The photographer and Goodall fell in love, married and had a child who was sometimes kept safe in a small cage in the jungle so the chimpanzees wouldn’t kidnap him. In addition, Goodall’s fame grew through a series of magazine reports and her research project became a permanent research center, formally established