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Emmy Award-winning PBS series
Jane Goodall's Wild Chimpanzees
This lively program takes you on a trip deep into Tanzania's Gombe National Park to witness an absorbing family saga. Jane Goodall gives you privileged access to a dominant chimp clan that she's known since the days of her groundbreaking research in the 1960s. The then two-year-old chimp Fifi is now a 37 year-old mother of six children, including thoughtful clan leader Freud and his brash, jealous and self-centered brother Frodo. The program draws you into the family's surprisingly complex day-to-day life, with its use of tools to catch food, its ambivalent relations with baboons and other neighboring monkeys, and its intense social interaction among family members. Indeed, this revealing look at wild chimpanzees often plays like a family soap opera, as Frodo repeatedly challenges Freud's rule while much younger brothers Ferdinand and Faustino-the dynasty's future-look on and learn.
Monkey In the Mirror
They stare into their mother's eyes and learn from her expression. As adults, they use tools, communicate with a kind of language, practice power politics, and even develop the rudiments of culture. They show compassion, deception, and empathy. Who are "they"? They're chimps and other primates, whose behavior sometimes seems almost "human." Are they really that similar to us? How does their intelligence compare to our own? This program searches for the answers in the laboratory and in the wild alike. We see a chimp looking into a mirror-and developing self-recognition for the first time. And we venture to Central Zaire to observe the rarely seen pygmy chimps, the most vocally communicative of all the Great Apes. While highly controversial, the findings in this remain fascinating-and give us a new respect for the world of non-human primates.
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