Insights into chimps — and humans

Jane Goodall, the trailblazing naturalist whose intimate observations of chimpanzees in the African wild produced powerful insights that transformed basic conceptions of humankind, has died. She was 91.

- ELAINE WOO

A TIRELESS ADVOCATE

Jane Goodall with Bahati, a 3-year-old female chimpanzee, at the Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary, north of Nairobi, in 1997.

A tireless advocate of preserving chimpanzees' natural habitat, Goodall died on Wednesday morning in California of natural causes, the Jane Goodall Institute announced on its Instagram page.

"Dr. Goodall's discoveries as an ethologist revolutionized science," the institute said in a statement.

A protégé of anthropologist Louis S.B. Leakey, Goodall made history in 1960 when she discovered that chimpanzees, humankind's closest living ancestors, made and used tools, characteristics that scientists had long thought were exclusive to humans.

She also found that chimps hunted prey, ate meat and were capable of a range of emotions and behaviors similar to those of humans, including filial love, grief and violence bordering on warfare.

In the course of establishing one of the world's longest-running studies of wild animal behavior at what is now Tanzania's Gombe Stream National Park, she gave her chimp subjects names instead of numbers, a practice that raised eyebrows in the male-dominated field of primate studies in the 1960s.

But within a decade, the trim British scientist with the tidy ponytail was a National Geographic heroine, whose books and films educated a worldwide audience with stories of the apes she called David Graybeard, Mr. McGregor, Gilka and Flo.

"When we read about a woman who gives funny names to chimpanzees and then follows them into the bush, meticulously recording their every grunt and groom, we are reluctant to admit such activity into the big leagues," the late biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote of the scientific world's initial reaction to Goodall.