The name David Graybeard may not ring many bells, but it struck the science world like a sonar blast when it hit the scene in the 1960s.
Naming violated rules of the scientific community at the time, when Jane Goodall gave it to a chimpanzee she was studying in Tanzania’s Gombe National Park. Giving animals names anthropomorphized them, invited emotional bias, and disrupted the statistics.
So, when Goodall reported how David Graybeard modified a tree branch into a probe for harvesting termites to eat, her scientific elders dismissed her findings claiming she was doing it wrong. Or as Hank Green, the YouTube science communicator and Montana resident, put it on his Vlogbrothers post, she violated the belief that “humans were intrinsically unique and animals were mechanical.”
“But what scientists had dismissed as instinct began to look suspiciously like culture,” Green said in his video eulogy to Goodall, who died last week at 91. “The tools designed to help us uncover truth were hiding the truth. She expanded the very range of what science could see, and showed us that we are not alone.”
Goodall passed away peacefully in her sleep October 1 in Los Angeles during a speaking tour of the United States, according to the Jane Goodall Institute. At the time, she was spending about 300 days a year traveling and speaking.
One of her final acts was to record a video message for the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, just days before she died. In it, she welcomed visitors to the “Becoming Jane: The Evolution of Dr. Jane Goodall” exhibit which opened October 3.
MOR marketing director Alicia Harvey said the museum had arranged to receive the traveling display more than a year ago. Codeveloped by the Jane Goodall Institute and National Geographic Society, the exhibit has been shown in museums around the world since 2019. But it doesn’t show the depth of Goodall’s Rocky Mountain West connections.
For example, many Montanans recall Goodall’s outdoor President’s Lecture at the University of Montana in 2022, when more than a thousand people packed the Oval in the middle of campus to hear her speak about tipping over scientific traditions in pursuit of scientific understanding.
“She talked about her beginnings and being a biologist, but not going to school for biology at first,” recalled Missoula resident Laurie Stalling, who braved the hot June weather that year to see Goodall in person. “She talked about how the academics insisted on being very scientific, how you couldn’t get attached to the chimpanzees, you couldn’t assign human values to them. She talked about that, and then said ‘Screw it, this is what I’m going to do.’”
Under the mentorship of anthropologist Louis Leakey, Goodall made her discovery that chimps made and used tools just months after starting her observations. His telegram response, in the 1960s version of an all-caps text message, blared the significance of her research in outdoor voice:
“NOW WE MUST REDEFINE TOOL STOP
REDEFINE MAN STOP
OR ACCEPT CHIMPANZEES AS HUMAN”
Based on that work, and without an undergraduate degree, Goodall enrolled in Great Britain’s Cambridge University and earned her doctorate in 1965. She spent 65 years studying wildlife, primarily chimpanzees in the Gombe. That work revolutionized both understanding of primate social culture and the methods scientists use interacting with living animals. Along the way, she published 27 books and made numerous documentary videos and IMAX films. The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times has been translated into more than 20 languages since its release in 2021.
Beyond her personal field research, Goodall directed her eponymous institute to benefit both other species and her own. Its projects ranged from studying baboons and mandrills to habitat restoration and fighting poaching. The institute also championed microcredit programs, youth education networks and scholarships for girls.
“[Goodall] talked about how the academics insisted on being very scientific, how you couldn’t get attached to the chimpanzees, you couldn’t assign human values to them. She talked about that, and then said ‘Screw it, this is what I’m going to do.’”
Laurie Stalling, Missoula resident, Attended 2022 jane Goodall talk at the University of Montana
What few knew when Goodall spoke at UM in 2022 was that she had other Montana missions on her itinerary. She headed north to the Blackfeet Indian Reservation with a film crew to record the Tribe’s work restoring wild buffalo to their ancestral habitat. That footage became part of Goodall’s 2023 IMAX film, Reason for Hope.
“She came to see the buffalo and what’s going on,” recalled Ervin Carlson, director of the Blackfeet Buffalo Program. “It was kind of surprising to hear of her passing. We got to know her pretty good here.”
Carlson, also president of the Intertribal Buffalo Council, a confederation of 87 tribal nations committed to restoring free-roaming bison, said Goodall and her crew filmed the Blackfeet’s bison herds at their Buffalo Spirit Hills Ranch outside of Browning, and also shot the area around Chief Mountain just before the Tribe released a herd free-ranging animals there later that summer.
“It just makes people more aware of our work,” Carlson said. “Funders want to be a part of it and help out.”
Goodall knew the power of money to shape public opinion, and true to her iconoclastic style, used it in unexpected ways. Retired National Geographic Magazine editor and photographer Chris Johns recalled how in 2018 she paid to enter Wyoming’s first grizzly bear hunting lottery, hoping to win and then not use one of the 22 tags the state offered after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service delisted Greater Yellowstone grizzlies from the Endangered Species Act. She didn’t secure one, but two other members of the “Shoot ‘Em With A Camera” grassroots advocacy group did. A federal judge enjoined the hunting season and later overturned the delisting, keeping grizzlies under federal management.
“That was classic Jane, no doubt about it,” Johns told Mountain Journal. “She had this joyous fun streak in addition to her serious research side. She was so active and engaged on so many issues, it was hard to keep up with her.”
The Museum of the Rockies exhibit includes a replica of Goodall’s research tent, interactive augmented reality activities with holograms of her sharing memories of Gombe, chimpanzee vocalization games, and a multiscreen display showing her encounters. The exhibit runs through January 18.
Much of the exhibit is aimed at younger visitors, just as Goodall herself was in her speaking tours. Although The New York Times headlined one of its memorials to her, “There Will Always Only Be One Jane Goodall,” Laurie Stalling’s impression of the 2022 Missoula visit was that the researcher wanted to replicate herself as much as possible.
“I wanted to go up and meet her but there were all these kids,” Stalling recalled. “I thought, ‘let the kids meet her, not me.’ There was one kid who’d wrote a letter to her, and she called him out from the audience … The kid went up and got to talk to her and they got their picture together. Once I heard her talk, all I could think was what an incredible human she was.”
