Jane Goodall dies at 91 in California

Jane Goodall, the British primatologist whose fieldwork reshaped scientific understanding of chimpanzees and who spent decades campaigning for conservation, died on Wednesday in California at the age of 91, her foundation said. The Jane Goodall Institute said she passed away from natural causes while on a U.S. speaking tour; she had been scheduled to give a lecture in Los Angeles later in the week.

Goodall first traveled to East Africa in 1957 and began long-term study of wild chimpanzees at Gombe Stream in what is now Tanzania in 1960 under the mentorship of anthropologist Louis S.B. Leakey. Her observations there, including the documented use of sticks as tools to fish termites and evidence that chimpanzees hunt and show complex social emotions, challenged prevailing ideas about what separated humans from other primates. Leakey summed the scientific import of her findings by saying, "We must now redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human."

Breaking with then‑common laboratory and observational practices, Goodall named individual animals rather than numbering them and immersed herself in their daily lives to record behavior over decades. Her early research,...