Trailblazer who unlocked chimps’ social world

JANE GOODALL, one of the world’s most revered conservationists, who earned scientific stature and global celebrity by chronicling the distinctive behaviour of wild chimpanzees in East Africa — primates that made and used tools, ate meat, held rain dances and engaged in organised warfare — died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. She was 91.

- KEITH SCHNEIDER

Her death, while ona speaking tour, was confirmed by the Jane Goodall Institute, whose US headquarters are in Washington, DC.

The British-born Goodall was 29 in the summer of 1963 when National Geographic magazine published her 7,500-word, 37-page account of the lives of primates she had observed in the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in what is now Tanzania. The National Geographic Society had been financially supporting her field studies there.

The article, with photographs by Hugo van Lawick,a Dutch wildlife photographer whom she later married, also described Goodall’s struggles to overcome disease, predators and frustration as she tried to get close to the chimps, working from a primitive research station along the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika.