Chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall dies aged 91 on speaking tour of United States

Dame Jane Goodall, one of the world’s most celebrated conservationists who chronicled the lives of chimpanzees in East Africa, has died aged 91.

Her death, while on a tour of the US, was confirmed today in a Facebook post by the Jane Goodall Institute.

The post said she ‘passed away from natural causes’ in California.

It added: ‘Dr Goodall’s discoveries as an ethologist transformed science, and she was a tireless advocate for the protection and restoration of the natural world.’

Born in London in 1934, Dr Goodall’s future career as a primatologist wasn’t exactly surprising to her parents.

As a little girl, she loved reading Tarzan and Dr Doolittle books between the branches of the tree in her garden and was rarely seen without her stuffed monkey doll, Jubilee.

She began researching free-living chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in what is now Tanzania in 1960.

She travelled there despite having no experience or even a university degree to do what she loved – observe and write about animals.

It didn’t take long for Dr Goodall to be criticised by those in the vastly male-dominated field of primate studies in the 1960s, such as referring to chimps with names rather than numbers.

But Dr Goodall remained at the enclosure. For three years, Dr Goodall watched Flo, David Greybeard, Fifi, Hank and other members of a troop of primates as they lazed about, scratched themselves, munched on fruit and swung on vines.

At first, the chimps fled whenever she entered the enclosure, opting instead to watch them with binoculars from afar.

But within a few months, one primate she named David Greybeard approached her as Dr Goodall held out a banana.

‘Without David’s helpful introductions, Jane may not have been able to meet the other Gombe chimps,’ the Jane Goodall’s Good for All News website wrote.

And what Dr Goodall saw revolutionised science. She observed how humankind’s closest living ancestors snapped sticks to ‘fish’ for termites and ants for a quick snack.

Dr Goodall wrote of how David squatted outside a termite nest and pushed a long grass stem down into a hole in the mound.

‘After a moment, he withdrew it and picked something from the end of it with his mouth. It was obvious that he was actually using a grass stem as a tool,’ she wrote.

Not only did this reveal that they weren’t vegetarian as long assumed, but that humans weren’t the only creatures capable of making tools.

Chimps, Dr Goodall helped show, also experience familial love, grief and were capable of violence bordering on warfare.

Her findings, which she chronicled in a 7,500-word report, also discussed her own experiences living in a crude research station along the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika.

‘I became totally absorbed into this forest existence. It was an unparalleled period when aloneness was a way of life,’ she wrote.

‘But I was far too busy learning about the chimpanzees’ lives to worry about the meaning of my own.’

Dr Goodall was ‘the woman who redefined man,’ her biographer, Dale Peterson, wrote.

In 1977, she founded the Jane Goodall Institute, which works to protect the species and supports youth projects aimed at benefiting animals and the environment.

Dr Goodall would write 32 books, 15 for children. Her final book, The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times, saw the conservationist write about what future she sees in a world being upended by climate change.

‘I do believe there is evil amongst us. But how much more powerful and inspirational are the voices of those who stand up against it?’ she wrote.

‘And even when they lose their lives, their voices still resonate long after they are gone, giving us inspiration and hope.

‘Hope in the ultimate goodness of this strange, conflicted human animal that evolved from an apelike creature some six million years ago.’

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