‘If we have souls, then so do chimps’

Freddy Gray meets Jane Goodall, the primatologist whose ‘unprofessional’, empathetic approach led to astonishing discoveries about how human-like chimpanzees really are

A 76-year-old woman is making chimpanzee noises at me. ‘OOOHHH HAAAAA, OOOHHH HAAAA,’ she shouts. ‘And then there’s a WRAAAAH! That’s a threat! WRAAAH!’

This woman isn’t mad, though. She is Jane Goodall, the world-renowned primatologist, arguably the greatest behavioural scientist of her time. She is making ape sounds because I’ve asked her to, and because the subject of chimpanzees still inspires in her a child-like excitement. She spent three decades living with our distant relatives in the forests of Tanzania, so she’s justifiably proud of her fluency in chimp-speak. She completes her repertoire with a rendering of the friend-liest chimp greeting — a low-pitched, heavy purr, which sounds a bit like someone snoring. It must trigger some primordial calming instinct within me, because suddenly I feel at ease in front of this famous and distinguished woman.

It also helps that we are not in the jungle, but in a pretty house in Kensington, which belongs to Goodall’s friend and assistant Mary Lewis. Goodall is sitting on a green sofa. As she stares at me, her eyes passive yet fixed, a sunbeam steals though a window and catches the left side of her long, elegant face. It is easy to picture the middle-class 26-year-old from Bournemouth with long legs and a pretty face who, exactly 50 years ago, first went to study the chimps at Gombe National Park, near the shores of Lake Tanganyika.

‘People thought I was crazy,’ she recalls. ‘Girls didn’t do that sort of thing in 1960.’ The British authorities even forbade her to go alone. Luckily, however, Jane’s mother Vanne, clearly a hardy character like her daughter, agreed to accompany her.