What Jane Revealed About Us
Richard Jonathan O. Taduran, Ph.D. | 9 October 2025
Dame Valerie Jane Morris Goodall died on 1 October 2025 at age 91, ending a life devoted to questions about what it means to be social, emotional, strategic, vulnerable, and powerful — in our closest non-human kin. Her fieldwork, particularly at Gombe, Tanzania, did more than catalogue chimpanzee behavior; it reframed how we see humans: as part of nature, not apart from it. Her death is a loss — but her research remains alive, generative, and morally resonant.
Goodall’s work matters not as romantic natural history, but as comparative evidence. It allows us to test hypotheses about human evolution; reconstruct plausible ancestral primate lives; observe how environment, group size, diet, social pressure, learning, conflict, cooperation, and personality shape behavior; and assess how our interventions affect survival, adaptation, and social well-being in other species.
Humans are Primates
When Goodall began her work at Gombe in 1960, the idea that non-human animals made tools was still considered radical. Her observation of a chimpanzee bending and stripping a twig to fish termites marked a turning point: it demonstrated that tool-making is not uniquely human.
Soon after, Goodall documented chimpanzees hunting colobus monkeys. They coordinated their attack, shared the meat among group members, and engaged in frequent conflict — actions that challenged assumptions about chimpanzees being passive or strictly vegetarian.
She also recorded intense intergroup aggression and prolonged conflict (including what became known as the “Gombe Chimpanzee War”), during which parties separated, raided rival groups, killed group members, and reshaped territorial boundaries.
Goodall witnessed mothers teaching their infants, observed complex grooming networks, and tracked shifting alliances, dominance hierarchies, and the distinct personalities of individual chimpanzees. They experienced grief, adopted orphaned infants, and displayed both compassion and aggression.
Her findings narrowed the presumed behavioral gap between humans and other apes — especially in social, emotional, strategic, and conflict-related domains. These observations suggest that many behaviors long thought unique to humans have deeper expression among our primate relatives. They invite us to reconsider how cooperation, competition, learning, and care evolved across lineages and ecological contexts.
For biological anthropologists like me, this matters because it gives us empirical observations of living behavior in complex social mammals that are our closest relatives. From chimpanzee behavior, we can better model what selection pressures may have shaped social learning, cooperation, conflict, territoriality, tool use, and emotional responsiveness in ancestral populations. Goodall’s long-term demographic and behavioral datasets provide continuity across generations, which is rare in primate fieldwork.
Research Impact
Primatology and ethnographic field studies often proceed slowly: establishing habituation, recording detailed behavior, mapping social relationships, tracking births, deaths, migrations, conflict, and cooperation — these tasks take years and often decades to yield robust, meaningful patterns. That long-term timescale is the norm in anthropology because social systems evolve gradually, and only extensive datasets can reveal change, continuity, and variability.
Goodall embodied that commitment. For more than six decades she returned again and again to the forest: meticulously observing individuals, noting variations, documenting conflict, cooperation, diet, and lifespan. Her perseverance made evident patterns that short fieldworks would miss; her fidelity to context and detail set the gold standard for primate studies.
Her work did not stop at documentation. In 1977 she founded the Jane Goodall Institute to protect chimpanzees and their habitats, sustain long-term research, and involve local communities in conservation and education.
Her scientific authority gave moral weight to the urgent debates over habitat loss, poaching, zoonotic-disease transmission, animal welfare, and ecosystem protection. Because chimpanzees are especially vulnerable to human disturbance, their survival helps us understand the broader consequences of our actions.
Her findings show that chimpanzee behavior is not merely exotic; many behavioral patterns are analogues or precedents for human evolutionary paths. But important differences remain — tool complexity, symbolic culture, language, formal technology, and large-scale cooperation are more developed in humans, even as ape behavior reveals evolutionary roots.
As anthropologists, we inherit her data but, more importantly, her ethical questions: How do we observe without unduly disrupting behavior? How do we interpret without projecting human biases? How do we distinguish shared traits from unique ones? How do we advocate for species, habitats, and interdependence? How do we use comparative evidence responsibly in our broader narratives of human evolution, conflict, cooperation, and culture?
Jane’s Legacy
Jane Goodall’s work teaches us that to understand human nature, we must see ourselves in relation to others, not apart from them. Chimpanzees aren’t proxies for humans; they help reveal both what is shared and what is uniquely human.
Her observations are not anecdotal curiosities; they are systematic data points on behavior, demography, intergroup relations, learning, conflict, tool use, compassion, violence, and social structure. These data let us refine our evolutionary models and make better inferences about how social pressures shaped human evolution.
But the legacy is not only scientific — it is ethical. What we do (or fail to do) matters to chimpanzees, other species, ecosystems, and future generations. Goodall’s work shows that observation can lead to responsibility, data to advocacy, and insight to action. Everything is connected: our methods, our world, and our choices affect lives beyond our own.
If we are to understand human sociality fully — its costs, trade-offs, potentials, and vulnerabilities — we cannot ignore what our closest relatives teach us. Goodall gave us that path forward. Her death closes one chapter; our work continues.
I hope that more young Filipinos, inspired by Jane’s example, will pursue biological anthropology. It remains one of the most under-studied subfields in Philippine anthropology — and yet one with immense promise for understanding human evolution, human behavior, and our environmental responsibilities as humans, to ourselves and to other beings.