How Jane Goodall revolutionized knowledge about primates – 04/06/2024 – Reinaldo José Lopes

With this column, I would like to celebrate an extraordinary life. Last week, British primatologist and conservationist Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall, born in London on April 3, 1934, turned 90 years old. Jane Goodall’s trajectory transformed the way we see chimpanzees, our first cousins ​​on the Tree of Life, largely thanks to the courageous and unconventional look with which she began to observe them from 1960 onwards.

As we are in the age of lists – and, I confess, I like well-made lists about interesting subjects – I present below three key points from the researcher’s trajectory – and that of her colleagues.

1) The triumph of the purest nerve: Goodall’s achievements, at least as they happened, would probably be impossible in today’s much more formalized and competitive environment of science. But, in the very different context of the time, based on courage and persistence, a girl who had never gone to university managed to convince Louis Leakey, then one of the main scholars of human evolution on the planet, to send her to observe the daily lives of chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania.

The young researcher would end up starting her doctorate directly at the University of Cambridge, completing the work in 1966 based on her first years of fieldwork in Gombe.

2) Neither angels nor demons, like us: Understanding the behavioral complexity of chimpanzees in the wild is the great legacy of Goodall’s work (shared, of course, with many other scientists working since then).

She documented, on the one hand, the intensity of social ties between primates, adopting the use of proper names – David Greybeard, Goliath, Frodo – which, consciously or not, contributed to the perception that each of those apes was a individual, with his own personality.

His work also showed that the use and even manufacture of tools (normally from twigs, leaves and other plant structures) was an important part of the species’ habits. As the decades went by, we would eventually discover that there are “cultural traditions” of instrument use, varying from population to population of chimpanzees, as well as similar things in other animals, such as dolphins, elephants and crows.

Goodall also pioneered the observation of cooperative hunting among great apes – and the realization that a form of “warfare” could take place between chimpanzee communities. She was criticized for the methodologies she used – such as offering food to the monkeys, which was later interrupted –, but long-term studies with other communities of the species would show that her conclusions were essentially correct.

3) One of the “Trimatas”: Goodall’s protagonism sometimes makes people forget that she is just the most famous member of the trio of researchers known as the “Trimatas” (yes, I know, there have been better puns than that with “primates”…), or even the “Leakey’s Angels” (reference to the crime fighters “Charlie’s Angels”, or “The Panthers”, in Portuguese).

While she was dedicated to chimpanzees, American Dian Fossey (1932-1985) was sent by Leakey to work with mountain gorillas in Rwanda, East Africa. Finally, Biruté Galdikas, 77, a Canadian anthropologist of Lithuanian origin, went to the island of Borneo to study orangutans.

Together, the “Trimats” painted a comprehensive picture of the behavioral diversity of nearly all living great apes. The importance of their work cannot be underestimated not only in terms of advancing knowledge, but also in defending these species, cornered by deforestation, mining and animal trafficking. Thanks to them, we have a much clearer idea of ​​how precious it is to share a planet with these close relatives.

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