Jane Goodall and the chimp wars

Jane Goodall died last week, still on the road at the age of 91 and still advocating for biodiversity in general and the welfare of chimpanzees in particular.

- Gwynne Dyer

She was a hero to me and millions of others for her courage, her wisdom and her compassion. She was also one of the greatest self-taught scientists in history. As a young woman with no scientific training, she set up camp in Tanzania's Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in 1960 and began to live with a band of chimpanzees. Nobody had ever done that before — all studies had been done with chimps in captivity — but she gained their trust and began to study their real character.

It was breathtakingly human. Not only are chimpanzees our closest genetic relatives, but they share the same emotions, they have individual personalities, they even think in similar patterns (although a smaller brain and the lack of language restrict the range and complexity of their thought).

After three years in Gombe, she wrote an article for National Geographic that shook the foundations not only of primatology (the study of primate behaviour) but also of anthropology.

She revealed that chimpanzees hunt and eat monkeys. (Previously, they were thought to be harmless vegetarians.) She reported that they made and used tools. (Twigs stripped and shaped to fit into holes in termite hills and extract the termites.) They were far more like us than anybody had suspected.