Jane Goodall, the scientist whose studies of wild chimpanzees made her a household name in homes everywhere, has died at 91, according to an announcement published by the Jane Goodall Institute.
Chimpanzees seemed to accept Goodall as one of their own, and the public was fascinated both by her easy familiarity with the creatures and by her pioneering discoveries showing just how similar chimpanzees are to humans.
“They kiss, embrace, hold hands, pat each other on the back. They show love and compassion, and they also show violence and have a kind of primitive war,” Goodall said. “It’s because chimpanzees are so like us that we can then say: ‘What makes us different? What makes us unique?’”
As a child, Goodall dreamed of living with animals and writing about them.
“That was because I fell in love with Tarzan,” she told Fresh Air host Terry Gross on WHYY in 1990. “I had a terrible jealousy of Tarzan’s Jane. I thought she was a wimp and that I would be much better as Tarzan’s companion — which is true. I would be.”
Goodall was born on April 3, 1934, in London. Her father was a race car driver who went off to the army at the start of World War II, and her parents later divorced. She grew up in a spacious Victorian house in an English seaside town with her mother, sister, aunts, and grandmother. There was no money for college.
“My mother said: ‘Well, if you’re determined to go to Africa or some other foreign place, if you learn secretarial work, then you can get a job anywhere in the world,’” Goodall explained. She attended secretarial school and, in 1956, when a friend invited her to visit the family’s farm in Kenya, she worked as a waitress and saved for a one-way ticket.
Once in Africa, she quickly arranged a meeting with paleontologist Louis Leakey.
“He immediately discovered a very beautiful, very vibrant young woman, very passionate, totally focused on animals and who knew a surprising amount,” says Dale Peterson, who wrote a biography of Goodall. Leakey hired her as a secretary on the spot.
Leakey was busy unearthing fossilized bones of ancient human ancestors, but he thought someone should really study humanity’s closest living relative: the chimpanzee. To him, Goodall seemed perfect.
It didn’t matter to Leakey that Goodall had no university degree, was only 26 years old, and was a woman — not exactly the typical scientist of that era. In 1960, he proposed sending her to what is now Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania.
“The staff there said: ‘Well, that’s fine, but we can’t let a woman live alone in the forest, that would be unseemly,’” says Peterson.
She needed a companion, so she took her mother. The two contracted malaria, and the chimpanzees kept fleeing, but Goodall didn’t give up. She offered them bananas and approached them quietly and respectfully.
“Jane was the first one who really went out and stayed with the chimpanzees, tamed them, and got them used to her,” says Peterson.
In a few months, Goodall made a major discovery. Chimpanzees could make and use tools — as she learned by observing a chimpanzee she named David Greybeard. (Goodall called him “my favorite chimpanzee of all time.”) He stripped the leaves off a twig and used it to fish termites from a mound. Goodall later told NPR that her mentor, Louis Leakey, was impressed.
“He said: ‘Well, it has always been considered that man is the only animal that makes tools. So now we have to redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees with humans,’” she recalled.
The discovery shocked scientists, but so did the person who made it. Who was this woman without formal training, who named her research animals things like David Greybeard, Fifi, Merlin, and Flo? She spoke of chimpanzees as if they had emotions and personalities.
“In the 1960s, when she started, there was still a very mechanical approach to thinking about animals,” says Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist at Harvard University, who did his PhD with Goodall. “They were seen as machines without thought,” he says.
Wrangham says that when he thinks of Goodall, he remembers her tremendous empathy for animals and one other thing: “Her unshakeable honesty in describing what she saw.”
She wasn’t afraid to say that chimpanzees had minds. And she didn’t hide their dark side either. She witnessed brutal assaults, deaths, even cannibalism.
As she explained on WHYY’s Fresh Air, it really seemed like war. “I was shocked. I was sad,” Goodall said. “But I realized that, very sadly, it makes them even more like us than I thought before.”
In 1965, she was on the cover of National Geographic, and she and the chimpanzees were featured in numerous popular books and documentaries. To the public, she had really become like Tarzan’s Jane.
But over the years, she spent less time in the field, relying on students and colleagues. She had a son with her first husband, a photographer, and later married a politician. In 1977, she founded the Jane Goodall Institute to promote chimpanzee and environmental protection.
Goodall’s life changed dramatically in 1986, when she attended a chimpanzee researchers’ conference in Chicago and learned how wild chimpanzees were threatened by poaching and habitat destruction, and how chimpanzees were used in medical experiments.
“I realized I had to stop living selfishly in my little paradise and use the knowledge I’d gained to do what I could to help,” she recalled later.
Goodall became an activist, traveling almost nonstop to give lectures, and returning to her childhood home between trips. It could have been a lonely life, except for the fact that she had so many friends around the world.
Sometimes people asked: which do you like more, chimpanzees or people? She answered: well, it depends.
“Chimpanzees are so like us,” Goodall said, “that I like some people much more than some chimpanzees and some chimpanzees much more than some people.”
Source: npr.org by Nell Greenfieldboyce