Paul Redfern
31 March 2003
Nairobi — One of the most famous collections of chimpanzees in the world - in the Gombe National Park in Tanzania - is under imminent threat of extinction, according to primate expert Jane Goodall, who has been watching the community for more than 40 years.
Only around 100 chimps are now left in the national park and their survival is threatened by encroaching farms, refugees from Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and from people seeking to kill the animals for bushmeat.
The Gombe chimps are famous because of the research that has been carried out on them for nearly half a century.
In 1960, Jane Goodall and a number of colleagues started correlating detailed analysis on the chimps' way of life. This research has carried on ever since.
As a result of the ongoing study, one of the longest lasting in the world, assumptions about chimps have changed dramatically. Whereas previously the animals, man's closest evolutionary cousins, were thought of as peaceful, simple vegetarians, they are now known to have complex emotions, to be capable of communication, tool-making and even forming political alliances.
When the study started in the 1960s, Gombe was surrounded by endless tracts of equatorial forest on the western border of Tanzania but now the area, just 13 km long and 1.6 km wide, has been hemmed in "by farms and denuded hillsides," according to Ms Goodall.
Writing in the March 26 edition of National Geographic magazine, Ms Goodall says that the news coming out of the park is "distressing," with "growing human pressures on the park threatening the chimpanzees' very existence."
Only one viable group still survives in the park and aside from the threat from outside, there are concerns at inbreeding and disease among the remaining chimps.
Researchers believe that further encroachment on the park and a failure to curb the bushmeat trade could lead to the chimps' destruction.
They say that any kind of animal epidemic, fire or drought would reduce the chimp numbers below a level from which they could never recover.
Moreover, the chimps themselves are trapped in the park, with all forest corridors to other chimp communities having been cut.
Ms Goodall said that if such a group of individuals were lost, then the world would have eradicated "all the wisdom and culture that had been passed from one generation to the next."
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