Chapter 1 Summary and Analysis

For as long as she could remember, Jane Goodall was interested in animals and wanted to learn more about them. When she grew up she became an ethologist, someone who studies animal behavior; she followed the creator of the field, an Austrian named Konrad Lorenz, who started his work in 1935 and was still living when the book was written. He studied geese and parented them and ran humane tests on them. Sometimes ducks would lose their parents and would start to follow him. Ethologists like Lorenz constantly ask questions about animals. A German ethologist, Karl von Frisch, studied honey bees. Niko Tinbergen ran experiments to find out where animals live, sea gulls specifically. Goodall explains how ethologists run experiments in animals' homes.

Goodall started studying chimpanzees in 1960, living in Tanzania. It took a long time before she could get close to...