Jane Goodall, a British primatologist known for her work with chimpanzees, died on Wednesday 1 October, aged 91. She was in California on a speaking tour and died of natural causes, according to the Jane Goodall Institute.
Goodall is best known for her work with chimpanzees in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. She was the first to discover that chimpanzees made and used tools1. She went on to become an advocate for conservation, human rights and animal welfare, including stopping the use of animals in medical research. She established the Jane Goodall Institute, a non-profit wildlife and conservation organization in Washington DC, in 1977.
Here are the ways in which Goodall’s legacy will endure.
Humanizing primates
While studying for her PhD at the University of Cambridge, UK, in the early 1960s, Goodall broke with the scientific convention of using numbers to identify animals, assigning them names instead. She named a male chimp with silver facial hair David Greybeard. This change upset senior scientists at the time, but it is now common practice to use animal names.
“It was criticized as unscientific,” says Mireya Mayor, an anthropologist and primatologist at Florida International University in Miami, “but she proved that science could extend its boundaries without losing rigour.”
Goodall was among the first to show that animals had emotions, empathy and culture, traits that had been reserved for humans, Mayor says. Her research changed how animal studies were conducted, she adds.
Her discoveries in Gombe National Park “redefined humanity”, says Nick Boyle, executive director of Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia. Goodall challenged the idea that chimpanzees were herbivores, and showed that they ate meat, hunted and engaged in warfare, he adds. In 1973, Goodall observed a social divide between two chimpanzee communities that led to a four-year conflict and the deaths of all of the male apes in one of the communities.
Inspiring women scientists
Beyond primatology, Goodall’s legacy is the generations of women she inspired to follow in her footsteps into fieldwork, says Mayor. In 1961, Goodall was one of the few students accepted into a PhD at Cambridge without an undergraduate degree. She completed her PhD in 1965.
“She showed that a young woman with no formal scientific training could rewrite science and the understanding of animals on such a fundamental level,” adds Mayor.
Alison Behie, an anthropologist at the Australian National University, was one of the women Goodall inspired. After attending a talk by Goodall, Behie says she switched her undergraduate major from microbiology to anthropology and started taking primatology and conservation courses. “It was just a happy coincidence, but she came to speak at the exact time that I was not quite sure what sort of science I wanted to do,” she says.
In 2017, Behie introduced eight of her female students to Goodall during her visit to Australia. “It was a full circle for me to be able to show my own students what had inspired me to go down this path.”
