Jane Goodall, the scientist whose studies with wild chimpanzees made her famous, died at 91, according to an announcement published by the Jane Goodall Institute.
The chimpanzees seemed to accept Goodall as one of them, and the public was fascinated both by her familiarity with the creatures and by her innovative discoveries that showed how similar chimpanzees are to humans.
“They kiss, they hug, they hold hands, they pat each other on the back. They show love and compassion, but they also show violence and engage in a kind of primitive warfare,” Goodall said. “It’s because chimpanzees are so like us that we can say: ‘What makes us different? What makes us unique?’”
As a child, Goodall dreamed of living with animals and writing about them.
“That happened because I fell in love with Tarzan,” she told Fresh Air host Terry Gross on WHYY in 1990. “I was very jealous of Tarzan’s Jane. I thought she was a coward and that I myself would have been a much better companion for Tarzan — which is true. I would have been.”
Goodall was born on April 3, 1934, in London. Her father was a race car driver who joined 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 to work as a secretary, you can get a job anywhere in the world,’” Goodall explained. She took secretarial courses and, in 1956, when a friend invited her to visit the family’s farm in Kenya, she worked as a waitress and saved to buy a one-way ticket.
Once in Africa, she quickly arranged to meet paleontologist Louis Leakey.
“He immediately discovered a young, vibrant, passionate woman, totally focused on animals and with surprising knowledge,” says Dale Peterson, who wrote a biography of Goodall. Leakey hired her as a secretary on the spot.
Leakey was busy unearthing the fossilized bones of ancient human relatives, but he thought someone should really study humanity’s closest living relative: the chimpanzee. To him, Goodall seemed perfect.
To Leakey, it didn’t matter that Goodall had no university degree, was only 26 years old, and was a woman — not exactly the typical scientist of the time. In 1960, he proposed sending her to what is now Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania.
“The staff there said: ‘Okay, but we can’t let a woman live alone in the forest, that would be indecent,’” says Peterson.
She needed a companion, so she brought her mother. The two got malaria and the chimpanzees kept running away, but Goodall didn’t give up. She offered them bananas and approached them in silence and respect.
“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 just a few months, Goodall made an important discovery. Chimpanzees could make and use tools — as she learned by observing a chimpanzee she called David Greybeard. (Goodall called him “my favorite chimpanzee of all time”). He stripped leaves from a twig and used it to fish for termites from a mound. Later, Goodall told NPR that her mentor, Louis Leakey, was impressed.
“He said: ‘Now we’ve got to redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as humans,’” she recalled.
The discovery surprised scientists, but also the person who made it. Who was this untrained woman 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 considered irrational machines,” he says.
Wrangham says that when he thinks of Goodall, he remembers her tremendous empathy for animals and something else: “Her unwavering 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 aggression, murders, and even cannibalism.
As she explained on WHYY’s Fresh Air, it really seemed like a war. “I was shocked. I was sad,” Goodall said. “But I realized that, unfortunately, it makes them even more like us than I thought.”
In 1965, she was on the cover of National Geographic, and she and the chimpanzees appeared in several popular books and documentaries. To the public, she had really become 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 discovered how wild chimpanzees were threatened by poaching and habitat destruction, and how they were being used in medical experiments.
“I realized I needed 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, if not for the fact that she had so many friends around the world.
Sometimes people asked her: what 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