"Something strange is happening in the forests of Africa." "Chimpanzees are doing things no one has seen them do before:" "they're in a partying mood." "But that's not all." "At a site called Fongoli, in Senegal, they have also invented a remarkable way of catching a meal." "They are making spears and hunting, just like our ancestors." "Are these apes developing human-like skills in their own environment?" "After all, the great apes- chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas, and bonobos- seem so much like us," "it's hard not to feel a deep connection." "We have come to see that we're much more similar to them than we ever imagined." "But for every revelation about the power of their minds, another shows up a stunning difference." "If you think that human genetics and ape genetics are 99 percent the same, what we've managed to achieve in our current position on Earth is so strikingly different from that of apes." "We're trying to figure out, "What is it that makes us human?" "What's the little difference that makes the big difference?"" "How big is the gap between them and us?" "What's holding them back?" "In a remote part of Africa, there's something new under the sun." "Our closest living relatives are getting bold." "Chimps are supposed to be afraid of water, but this young male is climbing down for a dip." "He keeps a hand on a natural safety line as he overcomes his fear." "Has a boy or girl ever had so much fun in a swimming hole?" "Wild chimps have never before been seen playing like this." "At Fongoli, Senegal, anthropologist Jill Pruetz and psychologist Andrew Whiten are getting an extraordinary glimpse of chimp emotions." "The personality of a chimpanzee is extremely excitable." "I've hardly ever seen a facial expression like that." "I mean, that was extreme excitement to the stage of kind of losing control." "It's not merely just to cool off." "The juveniles have fun." "I mean, they play in the water." "They play a lot in the water." "This is only one of a rush of discoveries that is painting a surprising picture of ape minds." "They are more like us than most researchers ever imagined." "One by one, the skills and emotions we once thought were uniquely human are being found in apes." "Still, specific mental gaps- the little differences that make the big difference- will ultimately explain why we study them and not the other way around." "While the swimming hole is revealing chimps' emotions in the field, a new laboratory study is showing off their amazing rational powers." "At the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, psychologist Josep Call places a peanut inside a clear tube." "How can the chimpanzee get the snack?" "She has never seen this puzzle before." "For 10 minutes, there is no solution in sight." "And all of a sudden, boom, they solve it." "They have to understand that they can use the water as a tool." "This is interesting, because the water itself, it doesn't have any shape." "Using water as a tool seems like something we would do... on a good day." "Another tool is being put to remarkable use by wild chimps in their quest for a meal." "Back in Senegal, Jill Pruetz has been keeping a close eye on chimps' eating habits." "Throughout Africa, chimps eat almost anything, and they have a particular taste for meat." "Here, their favorite prey is the bush baby, a small nocturnal primate." "But these chimps aren't catching bush babies barehanded." "Pruetz has seen chimps making spears and using them to hunt." "Andrew Whiten hopes to join the ranks of the few who have witnessed this extraordinary behavior." "To make a spear, a chimp starts by breaking off a branch, then sharpening the tip." "All on the quest to capture a bush baby in its day time sleeping hollow." "So the next step would be that the chimp would approach the cavity and sometimes look in," "take the tool, jab forcefully into the cavity, multiple times." "It may not be ice-pick-sharp, but when driven by an arm up to five times as strong as a human's, it's a potentially lethal weapon." "They always either sniff it or lick it when they withdraw the tool." "What they may do is actually break open the entire cavity, and if they're lucky, find a bush baby inside." "Break, strip, sharpen, stab:" "these chimps take a series of distinct steps in a carefully premeditated hunt." "Pruetz and Whiten are closing in on the answers." "Most of the 20 spear hunts observed by Pruetz have taken place during the rainy season." "Over time she has seen every stage of the kill." "A chimp is inspecting a hollow, looking for a bush baby." "She breaks off a branch and makes a spear." "The first time I saw a chimp make a tool, I think I said something like," ""Where is she going, and what is she going to do with that tool?"" "She nibbles the tip to sharpen it." "Then, with the aid of her foot, she aims the point into a hollow." "Pruetz has made a landmark discovery." "Never before has any non-human species been known to routinely make and use deadly weapons." "So what does spear-hunting reveal about how chimpanzees think?" "Pruetz and her team have seen about half the chimps here brandishing weapons, which means spear hunting has spread through much of the group." "That seems natural to us." "But generating ideas and sharing technologies is one scientific definition of culture." "For Whiten, culture includes the human arts from beer to Beethoven, but it also covers the rudimentary traditions of ape societies." "Whiten is trying to discover what kind of mind can lead an ape to culture." "Young watch their parents, sometimes very intently." "And over the following months and years, they acquire that behavior." "So you have to be able to copy." "To prove that one ape can copy another, a student of Andrew Whiten's devised an experiment." "At the University of Texas," "Antoine Spiteri has built a kind of slot machine for apes." "He loads it with a grape." "To get the fruit, a chimp must first turn a disk to allow the grape to drop through a hole." "Next, a chimp must move a door that opens a handle to release the fruit pay-out." "Spiteri now trains a chimp named Judy how to work the device." "On her own, she'd never work it out, but thanks to a sweet liquid reward, she learns the sequence is two steps:" "rotate, then push." "Next, Judy's group mates enter." "Spiteri wants to know if, just by watching, the spectators will learn the technique." "Can these apes ape to win this food-finding game?" "One chimp seems to think she's got it and shoves Judy aside." "A minute ago, Judy was the only one with the knowledge." "Now another has it, and, quickly, the trick spreads throughout the group." "But for Spiteri, the most important question remains." "Have the next door neighbours also learned the solution?" "They have no social ties to the original group." "In fact, they are hostile towards them." "Would they set that aside to keep up with the Joneses next door?" "In no time at all, they're working the slot machine like old pros." "Rotating, then pushing the handle." "Learning by imitation is an essential skill for culture." "And culture, along with the complex thoughts and emotions behind it, was long believed to be uniquely human." "The history of Western thought has always been premised on the idea that there are beasts and there are humans;" "and humans are touched by the spark of God, and beasts are just beasts." "Something of a revolution came in 1960, when a young researcher, with support from the National Geographic Society, set up camp in Tanzania." "Jane Goodall observed that chimps' emotions seemed much like our own, especially the tenacious bond between mother and baby." "At a site in Western Africa," "Japanese researchers reported the story of an ill two-year-old chimp." "Her mother touches her forehead as if to check for a fever." "As the baby's strength ebbs her mother remains devoted." "When I see the scene of the mother looking at the baby," "I really recognize the emotional life of chimpanzees are so similar to us." "For weeks after the baby's death, the mother carries her baby's body." "Is the mother grieving?" "Can an ape be in denial?" "It's impossible to say exactly what the mother is thinking, but hard to dismiss her feelings." "Putting ape emotions on the map was just one of Goodall's accomplishments." "She also found powerful evidence of their intelligence." "Goodall was the first to report chimps making and using tools- in this case to "fish" for termites." "When she found termite-fishing, people were so surprised, and thought we should change the definition of humans," "or we should include chimpanzee as humans." "What Goodall couldn't have known was that at a place called Goualougo, other chimps had an even more sophisticated way to catch termites." "First they use a big stick like a shovel to open the ground, then they switch to a slender probe to pull up the insects." "Perhaps Goodall's most astonishing discovery was that chimps are hunters." "She watched a troop catching colobus monkeys by hand." "Although no one has established that they coordinate their efforts, the chimps appear to be cooperating." "And cooperation is, after all, one of the key drivers of human culture." "Could apes speed up their culture by working together?" "Imagine a group of chimps, armed and dangerous, hunting as a band." "So why isn't the Earth the Planet of the Apes?" "Do apes even have the capacity to cooperate?" "A series of new studies reveals the rudiments of teamwork in the great apes." "But they still come up short." "In an experiment at the Great Ape Research Institute in Japan, a chimp knows that food is hidden under a stone." "Researchers replace it with a heavier stone." "If two chimps each know about the food, can they work together?" "In repeated trials, no pair of chimps has ever cooperated to synchronize their pulling." "If one chimp is replaced with a person the other animal still doesn't collaborate, at first." "But, eventually, it figures out the sweet rewards of cooperation." "Ultimately, the chimp learns to ask for a helping hand." "A needy chimp may well recruit help from a human, but will it ever offer assistance?" "One of the most surprising findings of all of my years of studying apes has been that they will actually help humans." "If you're reaching for an out-of-reach object, if they understand what your goal is, then they will help you." "Of course if you've dropped your banana, you can forget it, you won't be getting it back." "Chimps can understand what someone else wants." "One study shows that they can even interpret another's actions as good or bad." "In Leipzig, Germany, a chimpanzee is about to receive a tray of food." "At the same time he's given a rope under the platform, he can pull at anytime to collapse the platform and end the experiment." "Another chimp now enters the cage." "This chimp is free to pull a second rope on top of the tray." "The first chimp is ticked off." "He pulls the hidden rope, and the game is over." "Was he just generally outraged?" "Or taking specific revenge on the thief?" "To find out, it is the researcher that now moves the food." "Once again the first chimp has lost his meal to the second." "All that has changed is who is responsible." "In trials where the researcher moves the food, the first chimp is much less likely to crash the platform." "That would punish an innocent chimp." "So chimps have a sense of justice, and they can cooperate with people." "Can they collaborate spontaneously with each other?" "Researchers placed fruit on a board just out of a chimpanzee's reach." "The chimps are behind bars to keep them from the food, and because they can be impulsive, strong and dangerous." "When a solo chimp can reach both ends of a rope, it hauls them in and gets all the food." "But on some trials the ends are too far apart." "If the chimp pulls just one end, the rope unthreads." "The chimp has another option." "He can unlock a door to bring in a helper who's been watching." "The two chimps now work together." "But a series of trials shows that this teamwork doesn't come easily." "The helper must be a friend, and the food divided into separate dishes." "Can a more loving ape cooperate better?" "At Lola Ya Bonobo Sanctuary in the Congo, victims of the pet trade are raised by human mothers." "When these bonobos grow up, they will spend their days outdoors, becoming savvy about life in the forest." "Bonobos are the most social of the great apes." "And in their groups, all friends are "friends with benefits,"" "a simple way to diffuse tension." "Calmer than chimps, how do bonobos fare on the cooperation test?" "Food is placed in a central shared well." "Ok, are you ready?" "One, two, three!" "All the food is in the same dish, so it's very easy for one individual to bump the other individual out of the way and steal it all." "It takes the bonobos a while to get on task." "But soon they get the hang of it." "Yay, bonobos!" "Yay!" "With their more congenial temperaments, bonobos are more cooperative than chimps are." "In fact, bonobos may take cooperation even further." "When a young male died at Lola Ya Bonobo, workers were trying to remove his body." "The staff decided to use sticks and try to move the bonobo towards a door." "They mounted an incredible defense of this body that surprised everybody and was extremely moving." "That's a fascinating reaction on the part of the bonobos." "They were not related to that individual, and yet, they took extreme risks to protect his body." "As they fend off the humans, it seems as if they're cooperating." "But what does it take to work together?" "Are they comparing the number of staff to their own troops?" "Can they calculate at all?" "At Kyoto University, Tetsuro Matsuzawa's experiments are revealing that chimps can in fact develop an astonishing facility for numbers." "He first trained a chimpanzee named Ai to touch the numeral that matched the number of dots." "Once Ai knew zero through nine," "Matsuzawa displayed the numbers helter-skeltered on a screen." "Ai quickly learned to touch them in ascending order." "In the final test, as soon as Ai touches the numeral one, white squares cover up the remaining numbers." "Can the chimp possibly remember all the numbers and their locations and touch them in order?" "The performance was really amazing." "Much, much better than we had expected." "But for Ai, learning numbers was a struggle." "Almost the same amount of training was necessary to teach three, teach four or teach five." "Or, even worse, it takes more time to teach five and then six." "Ai never got the feeling that children get when they realize you just add one to get to the next number." "In the United States, another ape shows a surprising gift for language." "Going to go help get some sticks?" "Good." "A bonobo named Kanzi, now at the Great Ape Trust in Iowa, picked up English without being directly taught." "Put the keys in the refrigerator." "Wearing a mask to avoid cueing Kanzi, researcher Sue Savage-Rumbaugh tests his comprehension." "Good job!" "Go get the ball that's outdoors." "Very nice." "Thank you, Kanzi." "Savage-Rumbaugh measures Kanzi's vocabulary at 3,000 spoken English words." "While apes can master words and numbers, other research shows that something else is limiting their cooperation:" "apes have emotional issues -rivalry, violence- and most of all, they're impulsive." "In a celebrated study that investigated impulse control," "Sally Boysen of Ohio State University asked chimps to choose between two dishes of sweets." "Now, you watch real carefully." "We're going to put one, two, three, four down here." "Are you watching, Miss Priss?" "Sheeby?" "And we're going to put two in here." "Give those to Sarah." "Okay." "Well, I have to give these to Sarah, and Sheeba gets two." "So Sarah gets four and Sheeba only gets two." "Aw, too bad." "The twist was that the chimp got the sweets that she didn't point to." "Could she learn to resist her impulse to reach for the bigger pile?" "You want Sarah to have these?" "It's okay, it's okay." "You get to have that one." "Yeah, Sarah gets five, and Sheba gets one." "Oh, that is such a shame." "Amazingly, in the study chimps never overcame their greedy urges." "They always reached for more and, so, ended up with less." "Impulse studies have also been run on humans." "In a classic experiment of the 1970s, a researcher gives a four-year-old a simple choice." "So, if you wait for me to get back," "I'll give you this bowl with all of these gummy bears, okay?" "But if you can't wait, you can push that button, like this, and then I'll come back and you can have this bowl with just this one gummy bear, ok?" "Okay, I'll be right back." "According to an inconclusive but intriguing study, the longer children resisted temptation, the higher their school test results would be years later." "In any case, the differences between people are small compared to the gap separating humans and apes." "Maybe one of the first things that happened during our species evolution is we became much less emotionally reactive." "And maybe that's one of the big differences that may explain why we solve problems so differently." "We sort of got control of our emotions." "Can apes be given skills to help them master their emotions?" "Now you watch real carefully." "Sally Boysen trained a chimp to understand numerals." "She then repeated the experiment with the sweets, but offered different pairs of numerals rather than treats." "You want to give two to Sarah?" "Ok." "Two goes to Sarah, and you get six." "Remarkably, chimps were now able to learn what they couldn't before:" "point in to the smaller number to get the bigger prize." "Symbols can make you free." "They can help distance an ape from its impulses." "But outside of the lab, apes don't seem to use symbols." "Still, ape minds seem to share many of the amazing features of the human mind." "They have sophisticated social emotions." "They can cooperate." "They have culture." "Five." "Four." "Three." "Two." "One." "Their mental rocket is on the launch pad." "Why isn't it taking off?" "On an average day, human beings file thousands of patents, post tens of thousands messages over the Internet, and think millions of thoughts that have never been thought before." "Our closest relatives are different." "On a good day, an ape is lucky to use a tool to crack a nut." "What prevents ape culture from igniting like the human version?" "Recent studies that compare the human and ape mind are revealing something surprising." "Bonobos like Kanzi show their own kind of genius." "Kanzi, could you take off Sue's shoe?" "Could you take my shoe off, please?" "You might need to untie it." "Even skeptics agree that Kanzi understands more words than any other non-human animal." "He also uses an array of visual symbols to communicate." "But on closer inspection, Kanzi, like all great apes, lacks the full mental package." "Take Kanzi's use of language." "Most of the time, he will use these symbols to request things, to say "Take me there," or "Give me that."" " M'nMs." " You like M'nMs?" "Ok." "Now, Kanzi will not use those symbols to talk about the weather or to just make small talk, which is a very human thing." "When human infants communicate with others, they engage in a real conversation where each conversational turn is responsive to the turn that came before." "And they even ask for clarification if they need." "So you say "Huh?" or you say "Yeah,"" "and you let the other one know how the communication is going." "To engage in a real conversation, each speaker needs a sense of what the other is thinking." "Call this skill mind-reading." "Young children have not fully developed it." "Hey, so Zoe, guess what we're going to do today?" "We're going to play a game with my Princess Sally here." "See, this is Princess Sally." "And she's got a ball that she really likes." "This is her ball." "But she needs to go away for a little bit, so Princess Sally is going to hide her ball right over here in the bag." "See Princess Sally hiding her ball right over there in the purple bag?" "Yeah?" "So here she goes." "She's going to go away for just a little bit." "Now while Princess Sally is away, we're going to play a little trick on her, okay?" "We're going to move her ball from the purple bag over here to the green bag." "See how we moved the ball over there?" "Okay, so guess what?" "Princess Sally is coming back." "Here she is." "She came back." "Can you tell me, where is Princess Sally going to first look for her ball?" "Over here in the green bag?" "Can you tell me, why is Princess Sally..." "Three-year-olds make consistent mistakes about what others know." "The thing that's amazing about three-year-olds is how convinced they are about their wrong answer." "They're so sure that she's going to look for her ball where it really is because she wants it and that's where it is." "But by the age of four, most children are accomplished mind-readers." "Where is Sally first going to look for her ball?" "She's going to look in the purple bag, so she can find her ball." "She's going to look in the purple bag so she can find her ball." "As recently as 2001, studies seemed to show that apes don't know what others are thinking." "But then new experiments began to reveal unexpected skills." "In one study, as a chimp approaches a treat, Brian Hare moved it out of reach, establishing himself as a competitor." "Next Hare blocks his own view of one treats but leaves another within his sight." "It looks like they're generating a plan and saying to themselves," ""Ok, I want that food, and the one I'm most likely to get is the one he's not looking at, or the one that, if I sneak around, he won't see me," "and therefore I can have my yummy banana treat."" "This chimp seems to know what's on Hare's mind, what he can see and what he can't." "So chimps seem to share some of our skills of mind-reading." "Do we have any mental skills which are uniquely our own?" "A key clue comes from a new experiment." "Back at the University of Texas," "Victoria Horner shows a chimp how to operate a puzzle box to get a treat." "First, she taps." "Then she slots." "Next she pokes." "The chimp copies fairly well and gets the sweet." "This game we're going to play is about this special box I brought, alright?" "There's a gummy bear." "It's your turn." "Children copy the actions, much as the chimps did." "Look, you got him." "Alright!" "There's the gummy bear." "Good job." "The second box that I show the chimpanzees is this one, and it's identical to the opaque box except that it's made out of material which is see-through." "Only now is it obvious that the tapping and poking don't achieve a thing:" "the box has a false ceiling." "The chimps cut to the chase." "They skip the needless steps." "For the apes it's all about the treat." "What this study shows is that apes don't just mindlessly ape." "They also understand something more about cause and effect." "We found something quite surprising." "The children were pre-disposed to copy, even when it meant that they were doing something that was really rather silly." "So this seems a little like the chimps are outsmarting the kids in this particular study." "There he is." "You got him out." "Why do children imitate slavishly?" "At the root of the children's behavior is the fact that they viewed me as a grownup, possibly as a teacher." "That children expect to be taught is a vital difference." "While apes can copy, most researchers believe they don't teach each other." "Learning from someone else is the fastest way to get a new idea:" "faster than learning by imitation, faster than inventing a new technology in the first place." "In children, a penchant for teaching appears -even before language kicks in- in the form of a deceptively simple gesture: pointing." "A toddler knows that the cup being pointed to is the one that hides a treat." "Parents love it when their kids start pointing because it's evidence that the kid's trying to communicate with them." "Parents definitely notice the difference between babies who just point to ask for things and babies who point to show them things." "Apes don't seem to get that kind of pointing." "It doesn't matter whether Brian Hare points" "or stares or orients his body, this young bonobo is unaware that he is trying to communicate." "They were clueless at using the information." "Even after lots and lots of trials, they didn't use the information I provided them." "And it was a big surprise to everybody." "Pointing relies on a particular mental skill, a little difference that makes a big difference." "Whenever I point, I'm actually directing your attention towards a third object." "And you have to understand that my attention is on that object, and that I'm asking you, now, to attend to the same object." "So there's sort of a triangle between us and the object." "This mental skill, this "triangle," turbocharges teamwork." "What you'll see with the human mother and baby is that the mother is constantly trying to show the baby what to do, and the baby is trying to tune into what the mother wants." "And so you have a full triangle of mother and baby and the thing in the environment that they are trying to work on." "It's a special cognitive achievement." "For some reason kids do this naturally, almost immediately." "And curiously, apes can't get into that." "At the moment we have no evidence that apes have shared goals based on shared commitments." "They do things together, they coordinate their actions together, but they don't have a shared commitment to a shared goal." "The triangle is the core skill that makes teaching possible." "Humans have it; apes seem to lack it." "But apes are also missing one more thing." "It's a key emotional driver:" "the passion to cheer each other on." ""Good," "good job," "well done."" "This kind of facilitation, giving a hand, encouragement, is the base of teaching." "It seems like it's not just a cognitive capacity that's necessary for teaching." "There's this other thing, which is wanting to teach, that seems to be really pervasive in humans and maybe mysteriously missing in apes." "The pieces are now coming together." "Apes have a culture, a rare achievement in the animal world." "They can learn from each other through imitation." "But this process is passive, often slow and can easily backslide." "Probably there's a lot of slippage." "There's a lot of loss of cultural innovations between generations when you're talking about a chimpanzee." "If an ape invents something new and important and interesting, maybe some others will learn it, maybe they won't." "Unique among animals, humans have both the passion and mental skill to teach each other." "When you're a student rather than a spectator, learning happens rapidly." "That's because teaching locks in progress." "Human culture traditions have a cumulative quality that each generation builds on the things of the previous generation." "So if you looked at the history of any interesting technology, it started out simple, and the children of that generation learned the simple version." "But then some genius made an improvement to it, and everyone follows right away, and we get this ratcheting up in complexity." "An ape may stand on another's shoulders, but only humans can stand on the intellectual shoulders of giants." "It's such a great privilege to be able to work with these animals and try to understand what's going on in their head when they look at you so gingerly and softly." "Is it they're thinking, "Oh, he's such a nice guy, and boy, I wish I knew what was going on in his head?"" "Or is she thinking, "Gosh, what's that spot?" "Is it dirt?" "Could I eat that?"" "In spite of their limitations, when we look into the eyes of a fellow ape, we don't feel a gap but a deep connection." "We can't resist a chimp reaching out for help, or a group of unrelated bonobos rallying to the defense of another," "or a mother refusing to let go of her dead baby." "But as the most social of apes, we can't help reading thoughts and feelings into the mind behind any familiar face." "And perhaps that says more about us than them." "I had a tremendous sense of curiosity about the animals..." "I wanted to know all there was toknow about them and happily..." "I was rewarded by the same curiosity from the animals." "The gorillas fulfilled her desire for a lasting, even affectionate relationship because they didn't betray her." "Neither destiny nor fate took me to Africa." "Nor was it romance" "I had a deep wish to see and live with wild animals in a world that hadn't yet been completely changed by humans" "Wherever she went she found women who were supportive" "I don't know if women are more admiring of her strength of character, uh, I think I think men were afraid of her" "Because of it." "Imagine confronting a woman over 6ft tall furious with you, carrying a gun maybe, sometimes, always carrying a very viciously flailing tongue, she was a very frightening image." "Dian Fossey, spent 19 years studying the rare mountain gorillas of Africa." "Heroine of the feature film 'Gorillas in the Mist', her real life ended like a Hollywood script with a brutal and mysterious murder" "Dian first went to Africa in 1963, as a tourist on safari." "This home movie captures her at aged 31." "She'd taken out loans and saved her meagre salary for years for this vacation." "She wanted to see as many animals as she could, including species rarely viewed by tourists." "When she heard there were rare gorillas living in the mountains of the Congo, she persuaded her guide to take her there in this isolated spot she met filmmaker Alan Root." "At that time the Congo was in turmoil, and so there was no way we were expecting any kind of visitors." "And so, to see two people struggling up the trail to camp plus thirty or forty porters, uh, was pretty shattering and she certainly didn't get a very warm reception." "But Dian was not to be deterred." "She and her guide set up camp nearby." "Then she sort out Alan Root again." "and she came to us in tears and said, look you know I've come all this way, and uh, told us the story and brought a little bunch of flowers she'd collected in the forest." "And said could you show me some gorillas 'coz otherwise I'm gonna go without seeing them." "And so we felt sorry for her and that evening we heard a group up on the mountain behind camp, a bit dark and late but did have a wonderful view of them and when we went back to camp that evening" "she was just the Richter scale, you know she was just incandescent all evening and that was the beginning of the story." "I shall never forget my first encounter with gorillas - sound preceded sight immediately" "I was struck by the physical magnificence of the huge jet-black bodies blended against the green palette wash of the thick forest foliage." "Much later, Dian recorded these first impressions in her book" "'Gorilla's in the Mist'." "But for now she needed to return to herjob as an occupational therapist in Louisville, Kentucky, caring for disabled children." "Dian remembered her own childhood as lonely and unhappy." "Growing up in California, her parents had divorced when she was 3" "to earn a living her mother Kitty turned to fashion modelling in local stores, leaving Dian in the care of relatives." "When she was 5 her mother married an ambitious building contractor, a strict disciplinarian with little time for Dian." "She was often excluded from their lifestyle and instead found refuge in animals." "Dian yearned to become a veterinarian, but couldn't pass the required science courses, so she settled in occupational therapy," "and at 23 took a job far from home renting a remote cottage in the country outside Louisville." "It was here, 3 years after Dian's African safari, that a chance event changed the course of her life the famous anthropologist Louis Leakey came to town on a lecture tour." "Leaky had spent much of his life in Africa searching for evidence of the earliest humans." "He believed intimate studies of the great apes could provide clues to the behaviour of human ancestry" "After the lecture Dian approached Leakey and told him of her passion for mountain gorillas." "I told him that all I really wanted was to spend my life working with animals." "That had always been my dream and I was especially interested in the gorillas on the Verunga Mountains he'd started throwing a barrage of questions at me." "How often had I been able to see the gorillas?" "What was my current profession and what were my plans for the future?" "Leaky's protege Jane Goodall had already achieved great success with chimpanzees." "Leaky believed women were superior field researchers due to their patience and attention to detail" "Now he was looking for a woman to do a gorilla study" "To Leaky, Dian's inexperience was a plus." "She would have an open mind, free of academic pre-conseptions." "Louis called me to tell me in great excitement that he'd found just the right person to go off and study the gorillas in, in central Africa, and her name was Dian Fossey, and I listened to him not with half an ear exactly" "but I'd heard all this cascade of enthusiasm before from him and I said, "What's she like, and he said, oh she's very tall and she's dark, and she's lovely and she's wonderful and he will succeed."" "Leakey persuaded National Geographic to fund Dian's Gorilla studies." "What he didn't know was that she had mislead him about her first encounter with the gorillas." "We'd sent her some pictures just for her African scrapbook and she actually showed those to Leakey and said she'd taken them which guess would have got anybody the job." "She seemed to be the most unlikely person to do what he wanted done, given that these, these animals were living in very difficult terrain, uh, she, she clearly wasn't what you might describe when I first saw her an example of" "a very healthy specimen of Homo sapiens." "But it's always surprised me that somebody of that background should have been chosen." "The decision to send an enthusiastic but totally untrained 34 year old into the remote jungle of Africa struck many people as bizarre, but they didn't know Dian." "Although she'd been plagued by allergies since childhood, she had a will of iron." "She would need that resolve in the months ahead" "The mountain gorilla is the rarest of the great apes, only known to science since 1903." "Though new studies have revealed that gorillas can often be gentle and shy, many people still thought of them as King Kong - ferocious and terrifying." "By the 1960's, the mountain gorillas were in danger of extinction driven to their final haven in the high slopes as farmers turn forests into cropland." "In 1966, Dian headed for the gorilla's home in the Virunga mountains, along the eastern edge of the Congo." "Her starting point was Nairobi Kenya." "There she was reunited with Alan Root, who had introduced her to the gorillas" "And we couldn't believe it" "I mean, the Congo was in a bigger mess than it had been when she first came out it was a dangerous and kind of stupid assignment." "Two days before my scheduled departure," "Alan told me he intended to accompany me in his own Land Rover to make sure I at least reached the right country." "She had absolutely no idea that she was about to go on a diet of rice and beans and weevils." "She, if she'd have set off on her own she'd have taken fifty chocolate bars and a hundred doughnuts and, you know, a case of coke." "Um, when we talked about necessities for the hut all she could think of were curtains and a doormat because of the mud you know." "And for someone like this not exactly young anymore, and completely inexperienced to be coming out and going to a place like that," "I thought was, was madness." "It was a 700 mile journey from Kenya, through Uganda to the Virunga Mountains in the Congo," "and then a trek up 1 0,000 feet into dense jungle where the mountain gorillas lived." "You're operating in very thick forest huge stinging nettles," "I mean stinging nettles from hell, things with great spikes on them that, that actually made you weep with pain." "And the gorillas would walk through the middle of these fields of them acres of stinging nettles and you just had no option but to follow." "It certainly wasn't the kind of place where a nice girl from Kentucky should have been." "When I left she was absolutely terrified and she was going to be lonely and I think she was confronting that for the first time." "I'll never forget the feeling of sheer panic that I felt watching him depart" "He was my last contact with civilisation, as I had known it." "I found myself clinging to the tent pole simply to avoid running after him." "The strangeness of the near total isolation stayed with me for several weeks." "Dian was not only lonely and frightened, she had to overcome a terror of heights and struggle with poor health." "A heavy smoker she often found it difficult to breath." "But she stuck to the task Louis Leakey had given her." "To record in intimate detail the behaviour of the gorillas." "But first she had to find them" "Her African trackers put her on their trail and finally her persistence paid off." "Dian was making progress and learning to cope with isolation." "But soon, her mountain retreat could no longer protect her from the political turmoil below." "In 1967, rebellion broke out in the Eastern Congo," "Faced by a coup from the white mercenaries within his forces" "President Mobutu ordered that all whites be rounded up and killed." "Only six months after she'd set up camp, soldiers marched her down the mountain." "She was held captive for 1 6 days." "For a while, they locked her in a cage." "Intimate friends say she was raped repeatedly." "Finally, she managed to bribe her way out" "Yet, despite her traumatic ordeal," "Dian was determined to continue her work with the gorillas." "If the Congo was closed to her, she would try the other side of the mountains, in Rwanda." "To go back and start all over again after what she'd been through was just a measure of her incredible courage and determination." "And If you've got that kind of drive, um, you tend to disregard a lot of the things that normal people might actually stop and consider for a while, and certainly her safety was, was not something that she considered." "Dian's chief porter led her to a meadow 1 0,000 ft up." "A perfect place to set up her new camp, Karisoke" "She renewed her search for the gorilla's even more elusive here because of the close proximity of farmers." "Essentially, she had to start over," "Making contact with new gorilla groups and observing them from a far." "Until they became accustom to her presence." "National Geographic, a major funder of her research, decided it was time to send a photographer to join her." "Any pictures would be a scoop for the magazine." "Bob Campbell accepted the assignment." "I first saw her camp ahead of me, just a little tin hut, and her kitchen and a few tents" "She had just come back from the gorillas, so she was wearing all of her field clothes, which were dirty of course and I wanted to know what sort of person was prepared to sit up in the mountains," "all alone, fairly remote, and do this rather hard work with the gorillas." "But later on it was clear that she wanted to maintain strong control over my actions, that I realised that this was going to be a difficult period for me." "In those early days I couldn't say I liked Dian." "I found a temperament that was totally different to mine." "I was witness to her..." "full range of emotions." "Her sometimes mercurial turn to temper." "Tears and laughter." "The full range." "But then there were unfortunate incidences with her staff." "Her temper suddenly rose when they didn't do something with alacrity and I didn't see how I was going to get along with this lady" "It didn't take long for Bob to realise this wasn't going to be an easy assignment" "He'd been sent to get pictures of Dian with the gorillas, but she wouldn't get close enough to them." "She believed it would influence their behaviour and disrupt the process of gaining their trust." "For months, Bob got nowhere with his photography, and his relationship with Dian was strained." "but as he became increasingly valuable around the camp." "Dian's manner changed." "I went away to get some permits renewed and so on and when I came back the situation had totally changed, it took me by surprise in actual fact." "Dian had clearly come to terms that I was going to be with her for a long time and she knew that she needn't worry what I thought of her, or her methods or anything." "Aloof and reserved for so long" "Dian startled Bob one night by coming to his tent." "And she came and sat on my bed and said I just wanted to thank you for all the help you're giving me" "I was so taken aback that I'm afraid I rather discouraged her, because she tried to kiss me and I said" ""Dian, what are you doing?" "I'm sorry"" "And all of a sudden, her temper changed, her temper rose and she said 'Don't do that!"" "and, and you know, "What are you doing?"" "And, uh, because my reaction was so unfortunate she, she went off in a huff." "When the embarrassment wore off, their relationship began to improve." "Soon, they were working closely together and their teamwork took on a new dimension" "Pretty inevitably you stick two people with similar objectives um, together in a lonely and beautiful place and uh and uh something is gonna happen." "She broke down my resistance because I'm a married man and uh I wasn't really wanting to get into a close association but in actual fact, um, it began to enhance the study because she became so much more amenable" "and we were working so much closer together and uh a romantic attachment grew out of this." "Dian fell very much in love with Bob." "I don't think this was, well" "I know it wasn't just a convenience thing, that there was a man in camp and he was a very important person in her life." "I was seeing a character that seems quite separate from what other people found." "She could be kind and generous and as time went past she very seldom lost her temper." "And this meant that we were beginning to do things that she would not normally do;" "in other words try and get closer to the gorillas, specifically for photographic opportunities." "Bob encouraged Dian to approach the gorilla's on all fours" "Little by little she won their trust as Bob filmed with growing enthusiasm" "Never before had a research team become so intimate with mountain gorillas." "January 1970 was the first time" "I got her in physical contact with a gorilla." "Peanuts this youngster had watched her antics and she watched his and he came closer and she finally extended a hand towards him and just lay back, and he contemplated this for a while and then got up and quickly dabbed his hand on hers." "And she was overwhelmed by that, and later on she admitted this was the first ever touch." "To the best of my knowledge this is the first time a wild gorilla has ever come close to 'holding hands' with a human being." "I expressed my own happy excitement by crying." "The day that we saw the photographs of Peanuts was the day that we knew that Dian was being successful in habituating the apes, and that Bob would be successful in photographing the, this remarkable behaviour" "The interaction between the ape and the human made the apes more human and the human more ape-like." "I mean they suddenly they all looked like the same thing." "It was cute to the layperson and, and astonishing to the scientist." "Our monthly circulation was eleven million." "So eleven million people saw that, they were really wowed by them." "Everybody was." "It caused a huge hoo-haa and, uh, lots of publicity and I hope a lot of sympathy for the great apes." "People like Dian Fossey have star quality." "Before that star quality is realised, er, they're, they're eager for it, they're anxious for it they may not even know it themselves, but once it happens to them, they just unfold like a lily in sunlight they bask in it." "Dian was enjoying worldwide acclaim for her astounding rapour with the gorillas." "She had made amazing progress despite her inexperience and now working closely with the man she loved, it was probably the happiest time in her life." "To Bob Campbell she was a totally different person from the Dian Fossey he'd first met." "It was quite amazing to me the change because" "I had seen the very worst side of her to begin with when she was suffering so many difficulties and stresses and strains and as I became less of a stranger her normal feminine feelings came to the fore" "It was rather nice." "Dian yearned for a lifetime partnership" "Bob grew to care for her deeply but he still had a wife back in Kenya, so in their mountain retreat," "Bob continued to keep his distance" "I lived in my cabin, and she lived in hers so it was only occasionally we came together uh, in a romantic sort of way," "I think she found that quite difficult." "She obviously wanted to go far beyond just living separately and enjoying each other's company occasionally" "So Dian stayed busy, she was working on a Ph.D." "which would give her academic status yo pursue her studies at Kingwood University in England, she often had to leave the camp for months at a time." "While she was gone, Bob continued to film the gorillas." "They were becoming more and more accustomed to his presence." "At times, it seemed as if they'd almost adopted him" "It was never envisaged that a human being would get inside a gorilla group become almost part of the family, and then be treated as such by the members." "Bob befriended a young male gorilla." "He and Dian called him Digit because of a deformed finger." "And the most extraordinary thing was that he wanted a playmate" "He didn't just want to examine this creature;" "he actually wanted to play with it." "By now both the gorillas and Dian had got used to having Bob around " "So in December 197 1 when she impulsively opened a letter addressed to Bob" "Dian was shocked" "He had accepted an assignment with Richard Leakey, her sponsors son." "Dian confronted Bob." "I was totally surprised so my response to that was well it was sort of being organised but I hadn't spoken to you about it yet but She was very upset that I was planning something that she didn't know about," "and she said 'Well now if you go and join him don't come back." "I won't let you come back." "Come and work with me." "Come and be my partner, don't go back to your wife." "And it was a hard and fast ultimatum that I really didn't think she would carry through." "Their commitment to an extraordinarily successful working partnership continued for a time, despite their uneasy personal relationship." "Dian hoped Bob would stay, he hoped she would relent and not exile him from her camp." "As they continued to work together, Dian got to know Digit and Bob filmed them as they drew closer and closer." "It was on their very last day working together that Bob filmed the most remarkable sequence of Dian with Digit," "The wild mountain gorilla." "This last contact we took together was in good light and when, when she reached his side, she just crouched there and I whispered to her to reach out and touch him because I must have this contact" "Uh, she mistook what I really intended her to do was just to touch him gently so she banged him rather heavily and he didn't respond to this but then of course the sequence unfolded." "So there must have been something in her mind, this incredible sequence that I was filming was surely going to make me want to stay, and on my part I was thinking the same thing." "But neither of them backed down." "Bob prepared to go, though his feelings were torn." "I was very unhappy that I couldn't continue this relationship and give her what she needed." "Uh, there must have been a turmoil in her mind about how hard she should be with this ultimatum of hers." "She was shattered when Bob left" "I don't think she ever thought he would leave and when he did it suddenly left a huge, gapping hole in her life and was yet another blow, yet another reason not to trust people" "I think he was probably the great love of her life." "Um she, I never heard her say anything bad about him" "I think she was always sad that it ended as it did, but it was fated not to be." "Dian never allowed Bob to return to Karisoke." "Her heart was broken." "But she soon realised her gorillas needed her more than ever." "It was 1972, poaching was a growing business." "During the 1970's, er, Traders in Rwanda found that Europeans visiting the country would buy gorilla skulls and gorilla hands" "So it wasn't a, a local market, it was an external demand that was fuelling the poaching." "In addition European zoo's wanted to acquire baby mountain gorillas." "To take them from their families, poachers would slaughter the adults." "Dian's Karisoke Research Centre was in the rugged Volcanoes National Park." "The park guards couldn't control the whole area" "So Dian took it on herself to organise armed patrols before turning the poachers over to officials." "She often punished them herself." "She delighted in writing long literate letters about the things she was either doing to poachers when she caught them, or was going to do to poachers which was even more horrendous when she finally caught them." "Some of it involved castration, which she never did do to anybody, but sure did threaten." "A lot of it involved downright, she said, beating them with nettles, and hitting them with wires, and all kinds of things that are not designed to improve your relationship with the country in which you were trying to do your research work." "When you've only got a population of what it then was about 250 gorillas a small boom in business of dead, dead, dead gorillas is going to quickly wipe out a population." "And I have no doubt that if Dian had not acted as she did those gorillas would probably have gone." "Dian expected her research students to participate in the anti-poaching patrols." "Whether they agreed with her tactics or not." "Camp was her little kingdom, Karisoke was something that she had created and anybody and everybody who worked there as a student or as a fellow researcher was expected to, to do what they were told." "They lived under her authority uh, we did not feel as, as outsiders coming from the United States that we had the, the authority, the, the prerogative, to go out and arrest poachers to uh, be a vigilante force if you will." "Dian's treatment of captive poachers worried the researchers." "My concern at the time was that she was not the authority that had the right to deal with them." "Dian was insistent that she needed to speak with the poacher first." "I heard a good bit of yelling and shouting coming from the cabin." "I didn't want to be a part of it." "Saving gorillas from poachers traps became an obsession to Dian." "She frightened off intruders with Halloween masks." "Dian had a hell of a reputation in, in the area regionally she was known as a witch." "People off the mountain and, and folks who lived around the park had the idea that Dian did have supernatural powers." "Dian even attacked cattle led in the park to graze." "It seemed she would do anything to protect her gorillas." "She certainly viewed each gorilla group as her family, and er and related to every problem that they had." "Whether someone died, or someone was born" "She, she was totally consumed with their wellbeing, and in some ways more so than than you might with a human family." "Digit was her favourite, the gorilla she and Bob had come to know so well." "Dian loved him above all of the other gorillas" "They were terribly friendly with each other,uh." "He trusted her, she trusted him" "Their relationship was quite extraordinary." "There are marvellous photographs and film of this" "Digit really looked forward to the daily contacts." "He often invited play by flopping over onto his back, waving his stumpy legs in the air, and looking at me smilingly as if to say 'how can you resist me?" "'." "At such times I fear, my scientific detachment dissolved." "It was in January 1978 that Dian's researcher, Ian Redmond, came across a sight so horrific that he hardly dare tell her what he'd found." "It was the speared and mutilated corpse of her favourite, Digit." "He had put up a fight to protect his family, killing one of the poachers dogs" "The poachers had decapitated Digit, and cut off his hands." "His body was carried back to Dian's camp." "He was more than a child, in some ways, to Dian" "She simply couldn't come to terms with anybody taking his life." "Although I am sure she felt in her heart that it was to get back at her, which I think frustrated and upset her even more" "She felt guilty that in some way, because of her bad relations with Rwandans had caused his death and I think that made her really hysterical." "Um..." "She was hysterical for months." "She really, She never got over it." "She mentioned it over and over and over the rest of her life." "There are times when one cannot accept facts for fear of shattering one's being" "I have tried not to allow myself to think of Digit's anguish, pain and the total comprehension he must have suffered in knowing what humans were doing to him." "From that moment on," "I came to live within an insulated part of myself." "When Digit was killed er, it was a, a horrific event for me but," "I, you know, its hard to imagine what it was like for Dian, when she'd watched him from infancy, erm, reach maturity and then die in that way." "Digit had actually been killed on the last day of 1977, and, I think that was a, a turning point both in Dian's work and certainly mine." "But also in gorilla conservation because it really focused everyone's minds on what was then the main problem" "Six months after digit was killed" "Uncle Bert and Macho were killed, and Kweli was wounded and then Kweli died, but the change came because Dian told everyone in the world that the gorilla that everyone had seen on the television screens, as a friendly" "young Digit sitting next to Dian had been killed" "Because some trader knew that he could sell a skull and hands to some visitor for 20 dollars." "I'm having horrid horrid Dreams that they will all be killed and it is my fault" "I can't even look their pictures in the eye." "She felt they were her private children" "And she was appointed to take care of each and every one of them, and it was her duty and that no-one else really knew anything about how to do it." "After Digit had been killed." "Her health at the same time was deteriorating rapidly, she was suffering a lot from emphysema, or from respiratory problems of some sort and I felt that her emotional state was also increasingly weak." "Dian's illness was not caused by sorrow alone." "She lived an unhealthy life at Karisoke." "Dian drank heavily, Dian smoked heavily," "Dian did everything heavily." "She was an addictive kind of person." "In her drinking bouts Dian bullied and shouted at her staff." "And the young researchers who had once admired her from a far." "A lot of them were terribly young, they hadn't been away mama very long and, and uh, they expected to be received with open arms by this brilliant woman who was up there studying mountain gorillas," "and what they found was somebody who was screaming, shrieking at them and telling this that and the other." "She expected the people to basically be a lot like her, a loner, and a lot of us up at camp were friends - uh, we, we liked to get together for, for dinner for a half an hour to an hour each evening" "and that was frowned upon." "She picked on them, she made them sleep on bare floors, she, I think she made sure they were fed" " she didn't want them dying on her hands but she wanted them, things to be as tough for them as she perceived them to be for her." "We were basically dependent upon camp staff for a whole variety of things - including firewood, including supplies from the outside" "Dian was in control of all of those things, and if one made her angry she basically would cut off the supplies" "Which made life even more difficult." "The situation was complicated by the fact that many of the researchers were better qualified on paper than she was, despite her belated Ph.D. from Cambridge." "She knew that she didn't have the scientific theoretical background that she should have had to be the advisor to a PhD student" "There was something absolutely wonderful about Dian's science - she got amazingly correct quantitative data out of her old fashioned diary-recording methods." "None of us know how she did it but she was right." "She knew them so well that she could turn gorillas into individual beings and help us understand their social interactions and therefore why some groups had one characteristics, other groups had a different characteristic, some individuals behaved differently than other individuals." "As the years went by," "Dian became increasingly possessive about her mountain, her gorillas, her project, science had pretty much gone out the window by then and conservation was her be all, end all for the whole business." "Dian did recognise the complexity of the conservation issue." "The country African living on the fringes of a park area has little alternative but to turn to poaching for his livelihood but at the same time why should one condone a man if he openly breaks the law?" "Why shouldn't you take whatever action you can against him?" "But Dian's militant behaviour caused conflict with the Rwandan government and the growing conservation movement." "To them tourism was the answer to saving the gorillas, it would bring attention to their Plight and the funds necessary to protect them." "Dian Strongly disagreed" "She felt, I think rightly sometimes, wrongly at others, that they wanted to come in and use her groups and there was no way she wanted tourists coming and disturbing her animals." "on the whole she didn't believe in tourism because the tourist bothered the gorillas" "They interrupted her research, they harassed her and her staff and to the point where, you know, they would even hang around camp, taking photographs of you, as you're going about your business." "Dian on occasion would come into contact with tourists and had actually taken one of her guns and shot into the sky to frighten the guides and the guards and the tourists away, and I'm sure that was pretty effective." "It was incidents like this as well as Dian's insistence that no black African's guide tourists to the gorillas that left her open to a charge of racism." "Certainly she said and apparently did things to people of a darker pigment than hers that are simply unacceptable to the modern times." "I will not be responsible for habituating gorillas to African's until every last poacher is driven from the park, probably outside my lifetime." "Basically, her argument was look the enemy's of these gorillas are African poachers and if you get them to the point where they accept African's approaching them very closely like this, um, then you are putting them at enormous risk" "because they can't tell the difference between a friendly and an unfriendly." "Dian was also criticised for abusing her staff, but Ian Redmond didn't think her actions were racially motivated." "The way she treated her staff was often horrible, she was a terrible employer in the sense that she had a short fuse and would blow up at people if things weren't going right." "And in doing so, it didn't really matter what colour the person was." "I've been on the receiving end of plenty of outbursts." "I was nearly kicked out of camp several times for not being up to date with my paperwork." "Any part of your background or parentage or colour might be brought into a torrent of abuse that was thrown at you, but that was 'cause she was angry" "to some, the erratic behaviour of the wild American woman in the mountains, had become an international embarrassment." "Dian was a mounting concern for her friends," "American Ambassador Frank Crigler and his wife, Bettie." "There was nothing more important to US" "Rwandan relations, which I was supposed to be worried about, than how the leading gorilla expert in the world was getting along with the Rwandan Government." "So I spent a whole lot of time trying to ensure that their relations were at least um, OK." "I wanted to say, see that they were good, they were never really very good." "And all of us who loved her spent a lot of time trying not only to calm her down but to make her realise that for her own well being she should leave." "The United States State Department informed the Geographic that they better get that woman out of Rwanda" "Rwanda told us to get that woman out of Rwanda, friends of Dian's, including former Ambassadors and people in the State Department said 'look she's going to get killed if we don't get her out of there'." "And eventually she was persuaded to leave." "She was adamant about not leaving at first, she refused to think she was in any personal danger, uh but eventually she was forced to leave." "A real effective way to do that to somebody is to cut off their money." "Though everyone was trying to help." "Dian resented being forced to leave her beloved gorillas" "She felt that the National Geographic Society had let her down that the United States had let her down, that all of these charges were concocted, that she wasn't in any danger." "I think she felt betrayed," "I think there's no question about that." "It was 1980 when Dian returned to America." "Friends had organised a three year teaching post for her at Cornell University." "Here she completed the book 'Gorillas in the Mist'." "It was better received by the public than by the scientific community, but some of her closest associates found it hard to take." "She gave them little credit." "She had unfortunately rather cut me out completely, that upset me a lot because I'd contributed a great deal to her study towards the end and had completely changed her outlook on how gorillas should be studied and there was no mention of how this occurred" "She really took the kudos for it." "Dian could have probably been a bit more gracious in giving him thanks for what he did above and beyond the camera business, but it would have been sort of unlike a, a scientist to do that" "I mean most of the field researchers are pretty wrapped up in themselves and after all if she hadn't been there he wouldn't have been their either and uh," "I think that she took full credit without a backward glance" "And without blushing about it." "She very often didn't give people who had done important things for her credit because of this oddness in her personality where, when she got upset or she felt they had crossed her in some way, she really never forgave it." "She was unforgiving in that sense." "The international publicity which greeted Dian's book" "Dian's book put Rwanda and it's gorillas on the tourist map." "So in 1983 when she applied for a visa the Rwandans allowed her to return" "She said 'Well I'm leaving, I'm going back'" "I've gotten permission and I said fine, when will we see you again and she said well, you'll never see me again if you don't come visit me." "I said I love to come over there some time but I don't know when I can, you don't really mean it you'll come back and she said no, you'll never, ever see me again..." "I'm leaving." "I know now that I've truly come home" "No one will ever force me out of here again." "Poachers and hunters have been doing just about what they liked around here for the past three years." "There will be no more of that." "But Dian soon found that her influence had diminished during her absence." "Her campaign to save the gorillas had been overtaken by international programs, in co-operation with the Rwandan government." "A leading figure in this movement was her former researcher." "Sandy Harcourt." "By the time she came back from Cornell the Mountain Gorilla Conservation Programme was so well established that Dian had by then as far as conservation was concerned had become a bit player really." "But Dian didn't believe her part in conservation was over." "She reformed her anti-poaching squads continuing to patrol the mountain and upsetting the other conservation groups." "I am out of funds but am continuing with my plans in memory of Digit." "Every day that the conservation groups procrastinate means more and more animals are killed." "Tomorrow it will be the same and my personal savings can only go so far." "She was very frail when I knew her." "For herjust to be able to get out of the cabin and use the outhouse seemed like a major effort." "Limping wherever she went." "Out of breath always." "Uh, it was sad but every time I would see her she was trying to catch her breath or something." "Despite her poor health" "Dian continued to supervise her anti-poaching patrols, including the gathering of traps, but she was beginning to feel her actions put her in danger." "She slowly but surely started revealing to me that she was fearful for her life." "That there were people who in fact were going to um, um, uh try to get rid of her" "And she was going to outsmart them at their own game." "She confided in me that she had not very long to live." "She was not specific about how long and she told me at that time that she was doing a will and that she wanted to stay on the mountain to die." "The last night that I saw Dian she was very uh, very irritated for some reason." "I don't really know why." "Usually where she would say uh, come in she was just uh, very short and just said, you know, you don't need to talk to me tonight that's fine and she just uh, wanted, wanted to be left alone." "And that was fine it was at that point it was uh, around Christmas," "Christmas day whatever and there could have been lots of reason why she was feeling uh, sad or whatever and I went back to my cabin and went to sleep and, the next thing I know it was about 6 in the morning" "and uh, somewhere around sunrise when I heard the tracker Nemeye and a few others waking me up and saying in Swahili that Dian Fossey was Dead." "And I said what and they said come with me now, come immediately and I followed them down to her house and as we approached you could see that the whole metal hut on the side was bent and torn over and everything" "And when I went into the place the first thing I noticed was that literally everything in the house was destroyed." "Recreation mean it looked like somebody was going through the entire house looking for something." "All the drawers were pulled out, papers thrown everywhere, suitcases undone, chests that had things in it were all ripped out, everything was a total shambles, and I went into her bedroom and the mattress was kinda tilted" "and her drawers were all ripped open and I saw her gun hanging out of one of them and a bottle of whiskey in another one." "And then I saw her lying next to the bed and as I got closer and I looked at her face" "I could see this large gash in her face uh,uh and of course, next to her body was this panga or the machete that you frequently see the trackers with um, um next to her with blood on it." "And her face was just uh;" "literally her face was split open." "There were some who hoped the brutal nature of Dian's death would frighten away her researchers." "At the funeral Wayne McGuire said that he, for one, would stay on." "Now I was staying and continuing the research and that was a big fear." "Um, I know that I think that a lot of officials at the funeral were very shocked to hear that I wasn't going home..." "Wayne's determination to stay may have sealed his fate." "Seven months later he learned the Rwandan's planned to arrest him for Dian's murder, claiming his motive was to steal her research notes." "Wayne fled the country." "The police arrested one of Dian's trackers, Rwelekana, as Wayne's supposed accomplice." "After Wayne left the country," "Rwelekana was found dead, hanging in his cell" "Wayne was convicted in absentu, and condemned to death." "He still has that death penalty hanging over his head." "Poachers were accused of murdering Dian" "Later, I was accused of murdering Dian." "And I can tell you that I didn't kill her and I can tell you that poachers didn't kill her, but I'm not really right now prepared to tell you who really did." "There's lots of stories that she had major battles" "One of them in fact the Prefait of the local area was meant to have ordered her murder because she had some information about him." "I don't I frankly don't believe those." "I didn't see any of that intensity of dislike from any of the local people towards Dian." "When I heard that Dian had died my first reaction was to wonder whether it was one of the many people who must have hated her who had done her in..." "I wasn't surprised that she wasn't healthy but there were an awful lot of people who really didn't like the lady and I wasn't surprised but I do think that in her death she probably achieved one of her genuine objectives" "Which was to put the plight of the mountain gorilla of Rwanda on the map." "When you realise the value of all life you dwell less on what is past and concentrate more on the preservation of the future." "This was the final statement in Dian's diary." "The motive for her murder is still a mystery" "Though the mountain gorillas remain endangered." "Dian's strong and passionate voice did much to bring attention to their plight" "There's little doubt she would have gladly given her life for them." "There isn't much question in my mind" "Eventually her mental state deteriorated to a point where she could no longer help herself and she just sort of receded from human kind and probably the last moments of her life when she was murdered, her visions were probably of her gorillas" "and not of people." "so we don't know who killed Dian" "But we do know that her work continues because the need for her work continues" "And because people she inspired are still trying to continue."