This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast. I'm Meredith Johnson.

On the western edge of Tanzania, along the shores of Lake Tanganyika, there's a community where every waking

moment of life is tracked and recorded. For the last 55 years, this community has records for

every meal eaten, every mile traveled, every social interaction. It's all observed and written down

in meticulous detail. Emily Bame is a PhD candidate at Duke University,

and she's one of the observers there.

You wake up before sunrise and wait for them to wake up.

The sun starts to come up, and you're waiting to hear those first

rustles from the trees and also a great time to collect urine and fecal samples, because, you know, that's the first thing they're going to do.

They come down. You kind of hope that maybe they'll hang out there for a little while and feed so you can get at least a little bit of data before they start moving, but oftentimes they're really right off the mark.

They'll take off, and that's when we're crawling on hands and knees through vines and thorns,

and it's a lot of steep climbing.

Just following the chimp, just going where they want to take you.

Emily Bame is just one of a large team of researchers, students, and field assistants

at the Gombe National Park.

She's one of the many people who've spent long, sweaty days, crawling through thorns and vines,

watching chimps, and writing everything down.

All these researchers are part of the longest running study of any animal in the wild,

the groundbreaking Gombe Chimpanzee project.

Jane Goodall started the study in 1960, with just a pair of binoculars, a notebook, and a pencil.

And as the project's grown, they've collected the life stories of over 300 individuals,

the history of what every chimp in the community was doing every day.

...