In March 2022, the tangible assets of 60-plus years of chimpanzee research—the Jane Goodall Institute Gombe Chimpanzee Archive—arrived at IHO’s new offices in the Walton Center for Planetary Health on the ASU campus. The archive comprises thousands of physical and digital materials including daily observations of wild chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, related ecological data, and numerous artifacts.
The resulting handwritten, physical dataset, together with ecological measurements of rainfall, temperature, and food availability, is a unique resource that is unmatched in its depth and level of detail. It has been the basis for hundreds of scientific papers and numerous PhD dissertations.
In the early 1990s, there was a massive effort to organize, protect, and analyze JGI’s Gombe archive into a powerful relational database—the Gombe Chimpanzee Database. The database contains hundreds of thousands of rows of data extracted from physical data sheets. The archive and database represent the longest running wild chimpanzee study in the world and the only one of its kind.
IHO is the research home for primatologist Ian Gilby, who has spent the last 25 years studying the Gombe chimpanzees. He is a member of the original database team and is uniquely positioned and qualified to curate and oversee both the archival collection and the database, helping it to find new uses and new audiences.
ASU and the Institute of Human Origins are ideally positioned to preserve and disseminate the work and legacy of Jane Goodall as one of the world-leading programs in human origins research—training the next generation of young researchers and leading a robust public outreach program for how we “became human.”
During the past year, endowment funds have been used to build out the functionality of the Gombe Chimpanzee Archive Lab, which was also used as a backdrop for a short scene in Goodall’s latest film, premiered in Phoenix at the Arizona Science Center—Reasons for Hope.
Explore more about the Gombe chimpanzee research here.