Jane Goodall, one of the world’s most revered conservationists, who earned scientific stature and global celebrity by chronicling the distinctive behaviour of wild chimpanzees in East Africa — primates that made and used tools, ate meat, held rain dances and engaged in organised warfare — died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. She was 91.
Her death, while on a speaking tour, was confirmed by the Jane Goodall Institute, whose US headquarters are in Washington, DC.
The British-born Goodall was 29 in the summer of 1963 when National Geographic magazine published her 7,500-word, 37-page account of the lives of primates she had observed in the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in what is now Tanzania. The National Geographic Society had been financially supporting her field studies there.
The article, with photographs by Hugo van Lawick, a Dutch wildlife photographer whom she later married, also described Goodall’s struggles to overcome disease, predators and frustration as she tried to get close to the chimps, working from a primitive research station along the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika.
On the scientific merits alone, her discoveries about how wild chimpanzees raised their young, established leadership, socialised and communicated broke new ground and attracted immense attention and respect among researchers. Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist and science historian, said her work with chimpanzees “represents one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements”.
On learning of Goodall’s documented evidence that humans were not the only creatures capable of making and using tools, Louis Leakey, the paleoanthropologist and Goodall’s mentor, famously remarked: “Now we must redefine ‘tool’, redefine ‘man’, or accept chimpanzees as humans.”
Long before focus groups, message discipline and communications plans became crucial tools in advancing high-profile careers and alerting the world to significant discoveries in and outside of science, Goodall understood the benefits of being the principal narrator and star of her own story of discovery.
In articles and books, her lucid prose carried vivid descriptions, some lighthearted, of the numerous perils she encountered in the African rainforest — malaria, leopards, crocodiles, spitting cobras and deadly giant centipedes, to name a few. Her writing gained its widest attention in three more long articles in National Geographic in the 1960s and ’70s and in three well-received books, My Friends, the Wild Chimpanzees (1967), In the Shadow of Man (1971) and Through a Window (1990).
Goodall’s willingness to challenge scientific convention and shape the details of her research into a riveting adventure narrative about two primary subjects — the chimps and herself — turned her into a household name, in no small part thanks to the power of television.
Goodall’s gentle, knowledgeable demeanour and telegenic presence — set against the beautiful yet dangerous Gombe preserve and its playful and unpredictable primates — proved irresistible to the broadcast networks. In December 1965, CBS News aired a documentary of her work in prime time, the first in a long string of nationally and internationally televised special reports about the chimpanzees of Gombe and the courageous woman steadfastly chronicling what she called their “rich emotional life”.
In becoming one of the most famous scientists of the 20th century, Goodall also opened the door for more women in her largely male field as well as across all of science. Women, including Dian Fossey, Biruté Galdikas, Cheryl Knott and Penny Patterson, came to dominate the field of primate behaviour research.
Most of Goodall’s observations focused on several generations of a troop of 30 to 40 chimpanzees, the species genetically closest to humans. She named some of them — Flo, Fifi, David Greybeard — and grew to know each of them personally. She was particularly interested in their courtship, mating rituals, births and parenting.
Goodall was the first scientist to explain to the world that chimpanzee mothers are capable of giving birth only once every four and a half to six years, and that only one or two babies were produced each year by the Gombe Stream troop. She found that first-time mothers generally hid their babies from the adult males, prompting frantic displays by the males — leaping and hooting that could last five minutes. An experienced mother, however, she discovered, freely allowed males and other females to view her infant, satisfying their curiosity, in a far calmer introduction.
In her many articles, books and documentaries, Goodall explored similar signal moments in her own life. In March 1964, after a nearly yearlong courtship, she married van Lawick. Three years later, she gave birth to Hugo Eric Louis van Lawick, her only child, whom she nicknamed Grub.
But even there Goodall drew connections to her work in the field. She explained that her parenting philosophy and strategy were based on skills and values that she had learned from the chimpanzees, particularly the sure-handed matriarch of the troop, whom she named Flo. Nevertheless, she kept Grub in a protective cage while she was in the forest with him: She feared that he might be killed and eaten by the chimps.
Goodall’s ability to weave scientific observation with the story of her own life produced a powerful drama filled with characters of all ages, sexes and species. She once told a scientific meeting that her work would have had far less resonance scientifically or emotionally if she had just referred to the proud and confident chimp known as David Greybeard by a number, as was the usual practice.
She established the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977. It evolved into one of the world’s largest nonprofit global research and conservation organisations, with offices in the US and 34 other nations. Its Roots and Shoots programme, launched in 1991, teaches young people about conservation in 120 countries.
New York Times News Service