The plight of the 120 chimps stranded in that oasis is shared by all of Africa's Great Apes - the chimpanzees and gorillas, Goodall said in an interview in Johannesburg.

"I think it is a real race against time. Give it just 10 to 20 years and it will be too late...they (the Great Apes) are disappearing even as we speak," she told Reuters.

Goodall said Africa's three species of chimpanzees and its gorilla populations were under grave threat from logging, expanding human settlement and the bush meat trade.

"There isn't a forest now. It is just patches of forest all shrinking as human populations expand and logging companies drive deeper into them," she said.

At the start of the 20th century, there were believed to have been close to two million chimpanzees along Africa's great equatorial forest belt, Goodall said.

She said there are now thought to be only around 200,000 chimpanzees left, with the only significant populations in the two Congos, Gabon and Cameroon. Gorillas are even more threatened, with only some 300 mountain gorillas in the wild.

Goodall was in South Africa to oversee work on a sanctuary for orphaned chimpanzees.

ADAPTABILITY A PROBLEM

Goodall said one of the chimpanzee's greatest liabilities was its inability to adapt to new habitats. Unlike baboons, which can thrive in most of Africa's ecosystems, chimpanzees cannot survive outside the rain forest.

The same holds true for their cousins, the gorillas and the orang-utans of southeast Asia.

"Chimpanzees and other Great Apes have a very conservative nature," she said.

As as logging companies push into the rain forests, their roads give ruthless hunters access to chimp populations, which they kill for the lucrative trade in bush meat.

"This is not done to feed starving people. It is done because it is culturally preferable to eat the meat of wild animals," she said, adding that much of the meat ends up in upscale restaurants in African cities.

Goodall said she hoped the South African chimpanzee sanctuary - to be built near the famed Sterkfontein caves, where scientists recently discovered a 3.3-million-year-old ape man's arm and hand - would be an educational centre for the public that could prove to be one of the chimp's last refuges.