Most people know Jane Goodall, who died Wednesday, as a silver-haired conservationist who chatted with Stephen Colbert and gave speeches to the United Nations in defense of nature. For scientists, however, it’s the young Jane Goodall who followed wild chimpanzees for weeks at a time who endures as an icon.
“There will always only be one Jane Goodall,” said Michael Tomasello, an expert on the origin of language at Duke University.
In 1957, Dr. Goodall’s scientific career started with a phone call. At the time, she was only 23, having worked as a waitress and a secretary. But she had educated herself deeply about animals, and wanted to find a way to work with them.
She called the paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, who at the time was uncovering spectacular fossils of early humans and apes in Africa. She impressed him so much that he offered to support an expedition to Tanzania, where she would observe chimpanzees.
Dr. Goodall began her work at Gombe Stream Research Center in 1960. The chimpanzees there grew accustomed to her presence, allowing her to learn how to tell them apart. Soon she began noticing them behaving in surprising ways.
She observed one male chimpanzee, whom she later named David Greybeard, deliberately break off a stalk of grass and slip it into a termite mound to fish for insects. Later, she saw other chimpanzees use tools as well.
When Dr. Goodall relayed her observations to Leakey, he was stunned. Making tools seemed like a hallmark of humans and far beyond the ability of a mere ape.
“Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man,’ or accept chimpanzees as humans,” he declared.
Dr. Goodall also uncovered a rich system of communication among Gombe’s chimpanzees. The sounds they made were not random noises but distinct calls. They rounded out those calls with gestures made with their hands and heads.
The longer Dr. Goodall observed the chimpanzees of Gombe, the more distinctive they became as individuals. Some of the apes were dominant, while others languished at the bottom of the hierarchy. Some were kind, others were cruel, and many were both.
Dr. Goodall, who earned her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, shared her observations both in scientific papers and in hugely popular books. Some experts criticized her for giving the Gombe chimpanzees names instead of numbers, and for suggesting that they had individual personalities.
But her writing drew in generations of new scientists who did more research on chimpanzees and other apes. “It was after reading her books that I put on my boots and binoculars and went out in the jungle,” said Catherine Crockford, an expert on chimpanzees at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
Many of Dr. Goodall’s initial observations turned out to be remarkably prescient. “She opened the window into the mind of chimpanzees,” said Martin Surbeck, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard.
Subsequent studies demonstrated that many animals besides chimpanzees have personalities. “It was a paradigm shift,” said Marc Bekoff, an expert on animal minds and behavior at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a close friend of and frequent collaborator with Dr. Goodall. He was in the middle of working on a children’s book with her when she died. “‘It’s called ‘Every Elephant Has A Name,’” he said.
Dr. Crockford and other researchers have also confirmed that chimpanzees communicate with a wealth of calls and gestures. Their work has recently raised the possibility that some of the fundamental parts of language might have been present in the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans.
Jill Pruetz, a primatologist at Texas State University, said that Dr. Goodall’s observation of chimpanzees making tools stands as one of the most important discoveries about animal behavior ever made. “It caused us to re-examine our own species and to rethink the way that we consider and treat other animals,” she said.
Researchers have since discovered that chimpanzees are even more versatile at making tools than Dr. Goodall realized. Dr. Pruetz, for example, observed chimpanzees in West Africa fashioning spears, which they used to stab monkeys. These findings showed that chimpanzees are not hard-wired to make certain tools; instead, they develop toolmaking cultures. Dr. Goodall did not realize it at the time, but at Gombe she had discovered only one chimpanzee culture among many.
As a scientist, Dr. Goodall’s work extended far beyond human evolution, even to the study of pandemics. She collaborated with Beatrice Hahn, a virologist at the University of Pennsylvania, to document H.I.V.-like viruses in the chimpanzees at Gombe.
Dr. Hahn said the detailed records that Dr. Goodall amassed of the chimpanzees — charting their families and interactions — made it possible to track the spread of simian immunodeficiency virus through the chimpanzees. The records also revealed that S.I.V. harmed the health and fertility of the chimpanzees.
In later years, Dr. Hahn built on her initial collaboration with Dr. Goodall at Gombe to show that H.I.V. originally evolved from S.I.V. in chimpanzees, jumping the species barrier through bush meat hunting.
“Jane’s willingness to collaborate was critical for the success of all our work,” Dr. Hahn said. “She was a true scientist.”
Dr. Goodall did not sugarcoat the lives of chimpanzees. She saw them commit grave acts of violence, including infanticide. And yet she also saw them as individuals with rich lives.
Indeed, what set Dr. Goodall apart was her “deep empathy” for both animals and humans and her ability to connect with people around the world, said Joe Walston, the executive vice president for global conservation at the Wildlife Conservation Society.
In numerous books, documentaries, interviews and speaking engagements, Dr. Goodall spoke out about the need to protect the world’s wild animals and their habitats. She was “driven by an uncompromising desire to be able to protect that which she was studying,” Mr. Walston said.
The Jane Goodall Institute, which she founded in 1977, now funds scientific research and conservation projects around the world. It also runs Roots & Shoots, a global program that helps young people around the world lead conservation and humanitarian projects in their communities.
“She was so good with young people,” said Jeanne McCarty, who previously led Roots & Shoots and traveled with Dr. Goodall. “She kept her own curiosity and energy and enthusiasm that we all have as children and sometimes lose. I never saw her lose that.”
Carl Zimmer covers news about science for The Times and writes the Origins column.
Emily Anthes is a science reporter, writing primarily about animal health and science. She also covered the coronavirus pandemic.
The post ‘There Will Always Only Be One Jane Goodall’ appeared first on New York Times.
