LESSON 3 OUTLINE

Dr. Jo Thompson

Jo Thompson, now aged 47, took a degree in psychology and sociology from Wittenberg University in Ohio in 1978. After working and saving for 13 years, she went back to school, taking her master’s degree in anthropology from the University of Colorado in 1992, and her Ph.D. in biological anthropology and primatology from the University of Oxford in 1997.

For the past 13 years, Thompson has dedicated herself to helping the bonobo, its environment and the local human inhabitants – conducting biological field research, community-based conservation and wildlife education in the DRC. She has returned there frequently, despite a war led by rebel groups in the late 1990s, during which her research station base camp was "looted to the ground." Now that the unrest is, for the most part, over, she intends to rebuild this station and consolidate her conservation efforts.

You might be asking yourself, “what’s a bonobo?” View an introductory video to the bonobo. The bonobo (Pan paniscus) is considered the rarest of the great apes and the one whose behaviour most closely resembles that of humans. Though they are genetically no more closely related to humans than chimpanzees are (bonobos and humans have 99.4% similarity in DNA), their human-like traits include a predisposition for walking upright and for communication including facial expression. According to some experts, bonobos are the most important species in terms of what they can reveal about human nature from an evolutionary and psychological perspective. Estimates suggest about 30,000 bonobos live in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the only country where they live in the wild – but the threat of extinction is imminent, with bonobo numbers falling by half in the past 20 years.

Jo Thompson first visited the DRC–then called Zaire–in 1991 to carry out fieldwork for her doctorate. The following year she established the Lukuru Wildlife Research Project (LWRP), a territory of almost 24,000 square kilometres in the middle of this vast country. In 1998, she bought 34 square kilometres of virgin terrain in the southern half of the LWRP and created the Bososandja Faunal Reserve.

A major threat to the bonobos’ survival is human population growth and the habitat destruction this brings. Humans themselves are, in fact, a major focus of Thompson’s work as she tries to ensure that people and apes live in harmony. Thompson helped many people in the DRC to understand the value of bonobos. She puts the project’s success down to her frequent presence in the region over the past 13 years, and the fact that she "goes in alone", without other foreigners. Working closely with her team of 20 local co-workers in the field, Thompson "lives like they live, eating what they eat".

Learn more by watching a video on Dr. Jo Thompson!