Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal dies

Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal died on Thursday at the age of 75 from stomach cancer, Emory University in Atlanta (United States), where he taught, announced on Saturday March 16. “From his seminal 1982 book, The Politics of the Chimpanzee, to his 2019 book, The Last Embrace, de Waal has shattered long-held preconceptions about what it meant to be an animal and a human.”, greeted the faculty in a press release. Frans de Waal was in fact known for his work demonstrating that non-human primates are also endowed with abilities deemed human. The magazine Time appointed him in 2007 “one of the 100 most influential people in the world”.

Born in 1948 in ‘s-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands, Frans de Waal studied zoology and ethology before obtaining a doctorate in biology. His thesis saw him working with chimpanzees from Arnhem Zoo and he then made his first “major discovery”, underlines Emory University: chimpanzees reconcile after an argument. He will say during a 2011 conference that this is when his image of humans “beginning to change”. Frans de Waal moved to the United States in 1981, before settling in Atlanta to teach at Emory until his retirement in 2019.

In an interview with AFP in 2022, Frans de Waal also called for not choosing between nature and culture, going against the grain of often ideological battles. “We consider (the great apes) driven above all by instinct and biology, but we also see a culture in them”, he explained. In this context, “the concept of gender is useful because it emphasizes this interaction between biology and culture”, without neglecting the strength of biology. His latest book, “Different, gender seen by a primatologist”, sees the researcher sweeping several themes at the heart of the debates that agitate our societies: relations between the sexes, social hierarchy, violence, innate or acquired .