The world renowned primatologist Jane Goodall died at 91

David Graybeard’s behavior has also challenged the long -standing hypothesis that chimpanzees were vegetarian. Goodall noted that the chimpanzees hunted and also ate smaller primates such as colorbus monkeys, sometimes sharing the carcass with other members of the troops. She also recorded evidence of strong links between mothers and infants, altruism, compassion, aggression and violence. For example, dominant women sometimes killed infants from rival women, from 1974 to 1978, there was a violent conflict between two chimpanzee communities which became known as the Chimpanzee Gombe war.

Almost human

One of the most colorful chimpanzees that Goodall studied was named Frodon, who grew up to be an alpha male with a temperament very different from his literary homonym. “As an infant, Frodon turned out to be mischievous, disrupting Jane Goodall’s efforts to record data on mother-child relationships by entering his notebooks and twins,” said anthropologist Michael Wilson of the University of Minnesota in Saint Paul, Frodo developed a habit of launching renal rocks, emptying. human researchers and tourists. “Froadon attacked Wilson twice on Wilson’s first trip to Gombe, even by beating Goodall herself in 1989, although he finally lost his Alpha status and” was “consumed” in his last years, by Wilson.

Goodall has become so famous worldwide that she even presented in one of the Gary Larson Distant side Caricatures, in which two chimpanzees are shown in grooming when one finds a blond hair on the other. “Conduct a little more” research “with this tramp Jane Goodall? The legend read. The JGI was not amused, sending a letter to Larson (without the knowledge of Goodall) qualifying the cartoon an” atrocity “, but their objections were not shared by Goodall herself, who thought that the cartoon was very funny when she heard. Goodall The Far Side Gallery 5. Larson, for his part, visited the Goodall Research Center in Tanzania in 1988, where he first had the Alpha Defo aggressiveness.

Goodall founded the JGI in 1977 and is the author of more than 27 books, in particular My friends, the wild chimpanzees (1967), In the shadow of man (1971), and Through a window (1990). There was an initial controversy around his 2014 book Seeds of HopeCo-written with Gail Hudson, when portions were plagiarized from online sources; The publisher has postponed the publication so that Goodall could revise the book and add 57 pages of end notes. (She blamed her “chaotic notes” for the problem.) National Geographic published a complete documentary last year on the work of her life, drawing more than 100 hours of invisible archive sequences.