Jane Goodall

The primatologist who over the course of 60 years uncovered the uncannily human world of chimpanzees

- Patrick Kidd

In 1987, the American cartoonist Gary Larson drew one of his surreal Far Side sketches of two apes sitting on a branch.

The female, wearing 1960s-style glasses, picks something out of the male’s fur and asks in the style of a sitcom housewife: “Well, well, another blonde hair... Conducting a little more ‘research’ with that Jane Goodall tramp?”

The executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute, founded by the British primatologist, was furious. Lawyers were consulted and angry letters written to the papers that ran it. Meanwhile, Goodall herself was in Tanzania studying chimpanzees, as she had done for 27 years, blissfully unaware. When she visited America and was told of the insult, she let out a ripe guffaw. “Wow! Fantastic!” she said. “Real fame at last!”

Far from being offended, she offered to write an introduction to Larson’s next anthology, and he gave her institute permission to put the cartoon on a T-shirt and sell it to raise funds. He later visited Goodall’s research centre in Gombe national park, Tanzania, where he was attacked by a chimp named Frodo, who perhaps felt he had to defend her honour.

Larson had in fact paid Goodall a compliment, recognising the essence of her work with the apes of east Africa: that they were closer to us than had been acknowledged. “Are they human-like or are we animal-like?” she asked.