What she looks forward to the most?

Spending time alone with her chimpanzees. In the craziness of Jill

Pruetz’s life, after all the interviews, classes, lectures,

conferences and honors, she cannot wait to get back to Senegal to

spend some quality alone time with the African primates she has

spent years growing to love.

Like many professors at Iowa State

University, Jill Pruetz, associate anthropology professor in the

College of Liberal Arts and Science, is no ordinary staff

member.

“Chimps are always at the back of

her mind. She always has that pull to be out in the field, and if

she could always live with them, she would,” said Daniel Musgrave,

graduate student in physical anthropology and advisee of

Pruetz.

Jill Pruetz has been studying

chimpanzees in Africa now for over 10 years. In fact, she and her

colleagues just celebrated their 10-year anniversary with a party

in Senegal, the western African country where her research project

has developed into far more than simple observation.

While researching savanna chimps in

Fongoli, Senegal, Pruetz witnessed for the first time a chimp using

a wooden spear to hunt other small primates.

“In the past, that was something

that had been used to set humans apart from other animals, we hunt

with tools and animals do not, so that was a huge thing,” Pruetz

said.

This ground-breaking discovery led

Jill Pruetz to being named a National Geographic Emerging Explorer

in 2008.

Her work is currently being

showcased at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., as

part of the Human Origins exhibit in the National Museum of Natural

History. She contributed one of her spears to this exhibit, and saw

her work on display in the museum for the first time last

spring.

“I like being able to bring what I

do to a wider audience,” Pruetz said when asked about her greatest

achievement.

The success continues in Jill’s

life. This past year, Pruetz was awarded the Walvoord Professorship

by Iowa State. She is the first person to be honored with this

recognition in the College of Liberal Arts and Science.

With this professorship, comes a

newly found freedom. Pruetz is now able to branch out even farther

with her research and delve into areas she has never touched

before.

“It’s easy to respond to genuine

people and also people who are fun and relatable, and despite

everything she has on her plate, despite some of the difficulties

her work possesses, she is always genuine, she is always

passionate, and she can bring anyone in to what she cares about,”

Musgrave said.

In 2008, Pruetz began her own

non-profit organization, called Neighbor Ape. Her goal is to meet

the educational and basic life needs of the people in the area, but

also later focus on health related issues.

On Oct. 3 she was able to secure a

$30,000 donation to Neighbor Ape. This donation will fund the

construction of a dormitory, which will allow village children to

attend school in the city, where higher-quality education is

available.

Pruetz has been collecting

behavioral ecology data, mainly feeding and ranging, on chimpanzees

in Senegal for six years now and spent four years before that

getting the chimps habituated to her presence. This last year,

Pruetz was able to spend 42 nights alone with the chimps. Never

bored with her research, she does not think it will be boring for a

long time.

“I just wait for [the chimpanzees]

to do something, because they are always going to do something,”

she said. “It is so much fun, because I never know where they are

going to take me. It has really broadened my interests.”

With 189 sightings of chimpanzees

using spears to hunt bush babies, Pruetz has collected many spears

over the years and keeps most of them in Senegal for studying. One

of these spears was auctioned off and raised $2,600.

On her journeys, Pruetz has traveled

to areas all around the world studying primates. Her research has

taken her to Peru, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Kenya and most recently

Senegal.

“I have a lot of respect for her,

about the way she is like no nonsense when it comes to the chimps.

There is almost nothing that could stop her from doing what she

does,” Musgrave said. The experiences she has collected over the

years are innumerable, and students at Iowa State have much to

learn from her.

“With anthropology, I think,

especially these days, experience is the key. Once I started

getting experience, it was a snow ball effect,” Pruetz said. Her

own experience first began with volunteering help for captive

primates. Because of this experience she was asked to manage her

advisors project in Peru with tamarin monkeys and then was asked to

manage a project in Kenya.

“I felt really confident after that,

that I could start my own site. I mean, why not?” she said. In the

end, all of her personal experiences helped drive her to the place

she is at today, and she believes students should follow this

lead.

“Experience really gives you a leg

up and lets you see what you like. Especially with primate studies,

students need some sort of field course if they want to do field

work. Field school gives students an idea of what it is like, so

they are then able to decide if it is really something they want to

do,” Pruetz said.

With Pruetz’s first-hand knowledge

on chimpanzees and primates, it is no wonder why her fascination

led her to attend the 2011 film “Rise of the Planet of the

Apes”.

“What I really liked was the fact

they didn’t use any real chimps. That is still done in

entertainment today, and it’s not a good scene for the chimps,” she

said of the film. “I also really liked the detail in terms of the

chimps’ appearances. I don’t know how many people will really

appreciate it, but if you look at the chimps they are all very

different looking, and that is true because you don’t have just one

typical chimp. To me, chimps are just as different as

people.”

Pruetz was also very impressed by

the vocalizations. “There was a lot of laughing, and it was chimp

laughing in the appropriate places, and of course, then it always

makes me laugh because, you know, laughing is contagious.” Overall,

Pruetz strongly suggests people go out and see the movie. She said

that it has an empowering end which leaves you feeling

good.

“It was a fun, cool movie. I liked

it!” Pruetz said.

So what’s next for Jill Pruetz?

Well, there is not much this young professor is not willing to take

on.

“I just kind of go with the flow.

Hopefully I have decades left to work in Senegal, but I would like

to entice some of the former Iowa State students back to having

their own research sites in Senegal because it really is one way

that you can conserve the animals. To have an active research

center there and work with the local people,” she said.

In Spring 2012, she will be teaching

a distance course on primate behavior from Senegal, and she is

currently talking with National Geographic about working together

on a new series, maybe starting something like “Planet

Ape.”

In terms of her research, she just

lets the chimps guide her, but she hopes sometime soon to involve

other ISU researchers in her fieldwork.

“I can envision three former Iowa

State students actually embarking on long-term studies in Senegal,

and I think it is great to have an Iowa State contingent,” she

said.

On Wednesday, Oct. 12, she left to

speak in Anaheim, Calif., for the National Association of Biology

Teachers convention where they are having a symposium on human

evolution. She will return to her Fongoli chimps again over winter

break.