Leakey’s Trimates Inspired Me. Who’s inspired you?
Do you have a favorite author, artist, musician, or social justice icon who’s given you cause for hope and inspired you? As I write Voices from the Mist, The Last Days of Dian Fossey (working title), I’m reminded of some of the most inspirational people in my life, Leakey’s Trimates.
Louis S. B. Leakey was a pioneer British paleoanthropologist and archeologist. He theorized the long-term study of great apes, our closest living relatives, would help us better understand how human behavior evolved. He amassed a collection of thousands of fossils, but none of them shed light on how our human behavior evolved. So, Leakey enlisted the help of three unique women starting with Jane Goodall, followed by Dian Fossey, then Biruté Galdikas.
Leakey’s Trimates inspired me to volunteer on Biruté’s Orangutan Project in Borneo, Dian’s Mountain Gorilla Research in Rwanda, and at Lek Chailert’s Elephant Nature Park in Thailand. My husband and I had to cancel our trip to Jane Goodall’s Gombe Stream Research Center in Tanzania when the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam was bombed in 1998. Jane, Dian, and Biruté inspired me to spend 20 years in public speaking about the endangered apes they studied. I featured these three remarkable primatologists as role models of women who followed their wildest dreams and led successful lives doing what they loved. My theme was Follow Your Dream.
My favorite letter came from a third grader who wrote: “Mrs. Gallardo, I want to be exactly like you when I grow up, except I want to live on a farm and raise pigs.” Now there’s a child who got the concept of how to follow his dream.
Jane Goodall began her 61 years of research in 1960 in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. By starting the Gombe Stream Research Center, she discovered never before seen elements of chimpanzee behavior. For instance, chimps use tools, hunt, and eat meat. She also discovered chimpanzees will instigate a war with a neighboring group over food supply, access to females, and territory. We wouldn’t know today chimpanzees share 99% of our human DNA without Jane’s dedication to habituate the elusive chimps and her patience to observe them for six decades.
Dian Fossey began her quest to find and study mountain gorillas in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1967. After she escaped with her life from political instability, she headed to the Virunga Mountain Range in Rwanda. She founded Karisoke Research Centre between Mount Karisimbi and Mount Bisoke and combined the two names to create “Karisoke.” Her vigilance in tracking mountain gorillas through steep inclines, unimaginably thick vegetation, stinging nettles, and wild animal encounters set her apart from others who tried and failed to contact the mountain gorilla population. She patiently waited while they became accustomed to her presence and eventually habituated them for study. She was the first to discover mountain gorillas are gentle when not threatened, they share many of our human emotions, and they use vocalizations to communicate. Gorillas share 98% of our human genetic material.
Biruté Galdikas helped us understand orangutan behavior. She founded Camp Leakey in 1970 in Central Kalimantan, Borneo, in honor of the Trimates’ mentor, Louis S. B. Leakey. She discovered orangutans spend 90% of their time in the trees, which made her research particularly difficult compared to the other Trimates’ whose subjects spent the majority of their time on the ground. Leeches were another challenge. One night after a long day in the field, Biruté had to remove fifty leeches from her body. She also discovered orangutans don’t live in groups but are semi-solitary, and mother orangutans rear their young until they turn seven years old. When the mothers are ready to mate again, they encourage their offspring to eke out their own territories. Orangutans share 97% of our human DNA.
I’m honored to have met all three remarkable Trimates and to have helped Dian and Biruté on their ape projects. My contribution to Jane was the cover photo of a mother and baby mountain gorilla for an animal book series she wrote for children.
Hit reply and message me back with who inspired you? Thank you for your time and, as we say in Costa Rica, Pura Vida.
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