The legacy of Canadian primatologist Birute Galdikas

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Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current podcast. 50 years ago, a young Canadian scientist waded into the rainforests of Borneo, Indonesia with a mission in mind. She was there to study orangutans. Well, little did she know that she would become the world's foremost expert on the great apes and would spend decades with them. Biruté Galdikas became part of a group of well-known women studying our primate cousins alongside Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey. The anthropologist, primatologist, and Simon Fraser University professor died on March 24th at the age of 79. Matt Galloway spoke with Biruté Galdikas in 2021. Here's that conversation. What do you remember about what it was like when you first went into those forests in Borneo 50 years ago?

Well, 50 years ago, the transportation and communication networks were not what they are now. So when I went to Borneo, it was like I was going into unknown territory. Uh, it was terra incognita. I had no idea what I would find. I had gone to the Indonesian Embassy in Washington, DC, because I started my voyage of discovery or whatever, uh, in Los Angeles because I was, uh, uh, finishing up my PhD at UCLA. And nobody 50 years ago in the Indonesian Embassy had any idea about Indonesian Borneo, which is Kalimantan. Nobody had ever been there. Nobody knew anybody who had been there. Uh, so it was really a voyage into terra incognita.

What sort of reaction did you get from other researchers at the time when you said this is what you wanted to do, that you wanted to go into terra incognita to study the wild orangutans?

I got skepticism. I got doubt. People said it couldn't be done, uh, because several researchers had gone into actually North Borneo and followed wild orangutans or tried to find them, really couldn't find them, couldn't follow them, because the orangutans were mainly found in peat swamp forest. And researchers were, you know, wading up to their armpits in, uh, swamp water, and it was really very, very hard for people. But the reason I think it was hard is because they went to the wrong places.

Mm.

My mentor was Louis Leakey, who was known as the Darwin of human evolution and who was a living legend-

Mm

... in his time. And Louis Leakey, after he heard various people, uh, various well-known anthropologists, primatologists, what have you, uh, say that it couldn't be done, he said to me optimistically, "I believe in you." He said, "I will give you 10 years to find an orangutan." [laughs]

You appro- I'd read a story. You approached him after a lecture that he'd given?

Yeah, I was a graduate student at UCLA. I was taking a, actually a graduate class in, uh, archaeological dating techniques, and my professor was a friend of Louis