To anyone who’s ever felt inspired by Jane Goodall, brace yourself, because this news is going to break your heart: An exposé in The New York Times has found that Jane Goodall lied about the existence of chimpanzees.
Devastating…there are no more heroes left in the world, are there?
This morning, The New York Times published a report by investigative journalist Nicole Hong proving that Jane Goodall’s famed accounts of chimpanzee life, which launched the primatologist to international renown, were entirely fabricated. In fact, Hong’s research found that the chimpanzee species as a whole is the work of Goodall’s imagination, concocted to embellish her PhD thesis at the University of Cambridge—“a small fib” Goodall told over 60 years ago that spiraled out of control as it began to attract attention and opportunities for her in the field of zoology. Hong writes, “Jane Goodall was a young, ambitious primatologist who caught a taste of fame early in her career and developed an insatiable appetite for more, even if it meant betraying the global scientific community. Chimpanzees were a fiction created in service to Goodall’s ego, and nothing more.”
In a statement responding to Hong’s claims, Goodall did not outright deny the allegations, but did argue that she never meant for “the so-called ‘chimpanzee’ to be taken as literal, but rather as a metaphor.” But Goodall’s stated intentions are undermined by the extreme lengths she took to uphold her lie: The investigation found that the “chimpanzees” Goodall posed with in photographs and in film footage were in actuality human children and preteens “covered in discarded hair gathered from Cambridge barber shops.” Even worse, these adolescents were “under the influence of large doses of cough syrup,” which caused them to behave in the apelike manner upon which Goodall based all her descriptions of chimpanzee society.
Shame on you, Jane Goodall. Shame on you!
Millions of science-curious little girls now have one less icon to look up to. We don’t know what’s more tragic: the fact that is Jane Goodall a pathological liar, or the fact chimpanzees do not exist. All we know for sure is that we are so disappointed in Jane, and we’re going to have a hard time believing anything she says from now on. Ugh.
