Jane's Discoveries About the Diet of Chimpanzees
Dr. Jane Goodall was the primatologist who discovered that chimpanzees eat meat, which greatly changed the field of primatology.
"From the Peak I had seen, for the first time, a chimpanzee eating meat: David Greybeard. I had watched him leap up into a tree clutching the carcass of an infant bushpig, which he shared with a female while the adult pigs charged about below." Dr. Jane Goodall- English zoologist & ethologist (1934 - )
Goodall established the “banana club” with the group of chimpanzees she studied at Gombe, which was a daily systematic feeding method she used to provide a more thorough understanding of everyday chimpanzee behavior and gain the chimps' trust. As well as eating the bananas, the chimps ate different meat from mammals such as bush pigs, colobus monkeys, and antelope. On one occasion, Jane even recorded acts of cannibalism. Though meat consists of less than 2% of the chimps' diets, the discovery that chimpanzees were omnivores was groundbreaking and forever changed the way chimpanzees were viewed and studied.