Common Ground

Perhaps we are capable of extending our evolutionary legacy of caring and empathy to include our closest living relatives, ensuring that they will be around for eons to come. I can think of no greater gift to pass on to their descendants--and ours.

When Barbara Smuts ("Common Ground") was a child, she read Jane Goodall's accounts of the chimpanzees of Gombe Stream National Park and made up her mind to go to Tanzania and work with Goodall one day. Smuts realized this dream in 1975, when she spent several months at Gombe. She has also studied baboons in Kenya and dolphins off the coast of western Australia. Smuts received her doctorate in behavioral biology from the Stanford School of Medicine and since 1984 has taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she is a professor of psychology. Her current projects include the greeting behavior of baboons and the social relationships of domestic dogs. Smuts is the author of Sex and Friendship in Baboons (Aldine De Gruyter, 1985; reprinted with a new preface, Oxford University Press, 1999). For more on our kinship with great apes, Smuts recommends Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind (John Wiley & Sons, 1996), by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, and Next of Kin: My Conversations With Chimpanzees (Bard Books, 1998), by Roger Fouts with Stephen Tukel Mills.

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