Jane Goodall, one of the world’s most revered conservationists, who earned scientific stature and global celebrity by chronicling the distinctive behavior of wild chimpanzees in East Africa that made and used tools, ate meat, held rain dances and engaged in organized warfare, has died in California. She was 91.
Her death, while on a speaking tour, was confirmed in a social media post by the Jane Goodall Institute. It did not specify when she died.
The British-born Dr. Goodall was 29 in the summer of 1963 when the National Geographic Society, which financially supported her field studies in the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve, published her 7,500-word, 37-page account of the lives of Flo, David Greybeard, Fifi and other members of the troop of primates she had observed.
The article, with photographs by Hugo van Lawick, the Dutch wildlife photographer whom she later married, also described her own exploits to overcome disease, predators and frustration in her efforts to get close to the chimps while she was based in a primitive research station along the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania.
On the scientific merits alone, Dr. Goodall’s discoveries about how wild chimpanzees raised their young, established leadership, socialized 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.”
A full obituary will appear soon.
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