Farsighted genius that he was, he told me he thought my work would take at least ten years to complete, and this at a time when studies of just one year were almost unheard of. Of course, when I set out I had no plan to remain at Gombe for ten years. It seemed a whole lifetime when I was twenty-six years old. Yet had I stopped after only ten years, I should have continued to believe that chimpanzees, though very like us in behavior, were rather nicer.
