Jane Goodall was a primatologist, but when she died at 91 early this month, the world lost a force for good for all species, including homo sapiens. Born in London in 1934, she always dreamed of travelling to Africa. When a  friend invited her to visit in Kenya she realised a childhood dream.

In Kenya, the pioneer anthropologist Louis Leakey hired her as his secretary. She started her career in primatology by studying chimpanzees near Lake Tanganyika from a modest cottage that doubled as research station. Her mother too came with her when the authorities couldn’t countenance a young woman living alone in the forest.

She came to primatology not as a trained scientist but as person with an abundance of curiosity. She spent her time at the research station watching chimpanzees from a distance. It was similar to how the Jesuit theologian Walter Burghardt once described contemplation: taking a “long, loving look at the real.”

In time, a chimp she called David Greybeard connected with her. She observed that Greybeard poked a termite mound with a grass stem so they crawled out and he could scoop them up into his mouth. Greybeard also carefully peeled the leaves off the stem to turn it into a tool. she was the first to see this. So, her observations revolutionised primatology. Till then, tool making and use were believed to be exclusively human skills but here was a woman whose “long, loving look at the real” was revealing something more.

The December 1965 issue of National Geographic magazine published a photo taken by her husband Hugo van Lawick, which showed Goodall and an infant chimp reaching out to each other. In the same year, National Geographic released the first of its documentaries on her.

Speaking about the photo and Lawick’s documentary, People of the Forest, she told BBC in 2023: The chimps of Gombe “forced science to abandon the idea that humans were the only sentient beings with personalities, minds and emotions. Thus [this image] opened up a whole new way of understanding who animals are and showed that we humans are a part of and not separated from the rest of the animal kingdom.”

Magazines featured her work and derision followed fame. People questioned her practice of giving names to chimps instead of the usual practice of giving numbers. Her method of doing science was not text book. She was telling a story; and not just that. She was creating an entire world people could enter, and spend their time getting to know their inhabitants, including themselves.

Goodall lived nearly 20 years at the reserve, along with the chimps—the Gombe National Park in Tanzania. During that time, she unearthed behaviours that had not been not recorded in scientific literature. She documented internecine conflict between rival gangs of chimps, cannibalism, quarrels, bickering, play, chimps grooming each other. Her research yielded a PhD from Cambridge University. That, however, was the least of it. She rewrote the book on animal behaviour.

That work has inspired generations of scientists and conservationists. One primatologist who looks up to Jane Goodall is Jihosuo Biswas, a wildlife researcher with vast boots-on-the-ground experience. He is the coordinator of the Primate Research Centre—Northeast India.

He says Goodall’s discovery of chimps making tools and using tools “for food extraction, particularly protein extraction”, is fascinating. Most of Biswas’ and the centre’s work revolves around the western hoolock gibbon, the golden langur and Bengal slow loris. The hoolock gibbon is the only ape in India; lives in northeast India and Bangladesh, south of the Brahmaputra river and the east of the Dibang river, and Myanmar. The golden langurs live in only four districts of Assam, and six districts of south-central Bhutan. The Bengal slow lorises are nocturnal prosimians and live in Northeast India, Bangladesh and other parts of southeast Asia.

Biswas says Goodall’s work changed his own trajectory. Initially, he was working on entomological research. As he came to know more of Goodall and Gombe, he wanted to work with apes. Fortunately, he had the opportunity to study gibbons and how they are being affected by climate change. Biswas has been flagging the issue of habitat loss for primates in his more-than-25-years of field work and research.

In 2001, Biswas and his fellow researchers documented habitat loss and its effect on primates in the Borajan Reserve Forest in Assam. They write, “this small (5 sq. km) forest was inhabited by substantial numbers of five species of diurnal primates and the forest was typical of Reserve Forests in northwest upper Assam. However, selective logging and smuggling resulted in rapid degradation of the area. All primate populations declined dramatically and the small percentage of juveniles in each species indicated that all were in imminent danger of local extinction. There was no evidence of hunting or trapping… Borajan may be an object lesson as to what can happen but it need not be the harbinger of Assam’s future.” That became the harbinger of Assam’s and the country’s future.

Biswas says less than 10 per cent of the forest remains and one family—three individuals—of western hoolock gibbons lives in the Reserve; the rest have dispersed.

Similarly, the golden langur, which represents the mythological Sugriva in the Ramayana, has faced severe habitat loss in the last few decades, more than 50 per cent of its primary habitats due to political unrest, deforestation and encroachment. The situation was compounded by linear infrastructure like roads and power lines, which further isolated the langur population between fragmented forest, resulting in frequent road kill, electrocution and predator exposure, apart from blocking population exchange.   

Jane Goodall founded the Jane Goodall Institute and started a programme called Roots and Shoots that encourages young people to carry out projects that help all—animals, people and the environment.

If she taught us anything, it is that life is a continuum rather than a stitching together of a bunch of discrete categories.