photo by Shawn Sweeney
Jane Goodall, one of my "Immortal Loves" (link below), died today; she was 91 years old. She was born on April 3, 1934, and was an English zoologist, primatologist and anthropologist and was considered the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees, having studied the social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees for over 60 years. Goodall first went to Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania to observe its chimpanzees in 1960. I first learned about her sometime in the late sixties through a National Geographic article.
She proved chimpanzees had the same traits as humans, tool making, love, families, jealousy and even war. This in turn led us to consider what it means "To be Human", a question we have been asking for thousands of years. Priests and poets,
philosophers and politicians, scientists and artists have all sought to
answer this ultimate puzzle, but all fell short, never able to fully
capture the vastness of the human experience.
When she was a child she was given a book, Tarzan, created by Edgar Rice Burroughs; she fell in love with Tarzan and said "He fell in love with the wrong Jane!"
National Geographic ~ First Look at Jane
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