Fortunately for him, he was approached by three intrepid women who recognized that studying these animals can only be achieved by abandoning the safety of the lecture theater and completely immersing oneself in some of the world’s most inhospitable jungles for decades at a time. The world’s leading primatologist at the time was a Kenyan-born anthropologist named Louis Leakey, who wanted to put together a research team to uncover some of the mysteries of these great apes, yet found no suitable candidates among his peers. In the mid-20th century, very little was known about the behavior of hominids, a taxonomic group that includes chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and bonobos, as well as humans. In many ways, their relative exclusion from the self-congratulatory domain of male " armchair anthropologists" is what gave them the freedom to go against the grain and – in spite of some stiff opposition – eventually convince their colleagues that in order to learn about man’s closest relatives, they’d have to woman up. Breaking down the rigid barriers established by the male-dominated academic institutions of the 1960s, three pioneering female researchers showed the world that real science requires guts.
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