A male chimpanzee with his eye on alpha status will set aside his usual indifference to infants and go around tickling them, the better to curry favour with their mothers. The vote-winning tactic, variations of which will be on display in town halls everywhere in this super-election year, is one of the many examples of social strategy that the Dutch-American primatologist Frans de Waal documented in his half-century of observing non-human primates.
De Waal, who has died aged 75, was not afraid to make the comparison with humans explicit. He could be counted on to highlight the ape in us, from George W Bush’s “bipedal swagger” to the White House press secretary Sean Spicer hiding in the bushes from reporters and Donald Trump prowling behind Hillary Clinton during a presidential debate. He did so decades before it was fashionable.
When he started out as a primatologist, in the Dutch city of Arnhem in the 1970s, the accepted wisdom among animal behaviour experts was that non-human apes were capable of only the simplest kinds of learning, and no sophisticated emotions. Cognition, empathy and theory of mind were the preserve of humans. But this did not fit with what De Waal saw, day after day, as he looked out over the grassy island where the chimps he was studying lived, at Burgers’ zoo.
He witnessed plenty of aggression, but the aggression was almost always followed by reconciliation. Almost always. In 1980 an alpha male named Luit was viciously attacked by two other males and later died. Deeply affected, De Waal realised that peacemaking was not optional for chimps; it was a survival skill. Two years later he published Chimpanzee Politics, the first of his 16 immensely popular books.
By then he had moved to the US, to observe reconciliation at a monkey facility in Wisconsin. In 1991 he moved to Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and returned to studying his first love, chimps. The books came steadily, all of them displaying his signature style: intellectual provocation, deadpan humour, spellbinding storytelling. “Almost everyone has their story of being inspired to study animals after reading one of Frans’s books,” said the primatologist Zanna Clay of Durham University, a long-time collaborator.
Responding to charges that he anthropomorphised the animals, he accused his critics of “anthropodenial”. He railed against the tendency to see violence and greed as primeval urges that humans shared with their non-human cousins, while compassion and cooperation were uniquely human, the products of culture. No, said De Waal: good and bad run deep in all apes. Asked to sum up his career, in later years, he would say that he had tried to raise the non-human apes up a little bit, and bring the human one down – to show that there was not such a great gap between us after all.
He did not invent the term “alpha male”, but he did much to popularise and to nuance it. An alpha who is pure bully will never last long, De Waal showed, because as soon as a serious rival emerges the group will switch allegiance. The wily leader builds alliances and knows when to fight and when to console. And though he receives many perks, including privileged access to females, an alpha has a stressful life.
The field of primatology had been overwhelmingly male when De Waal joined it, but gradually the women came, and they asked different questions – notably about female choice. De Waal welcomed their perspective, realising that it filled out the picture. Though the alpha male dominates in chimp societies, he often relies on the alpha female’s support. Mama, the doyenne of Burgers’ zoo, could anoint a male pretender with a kiss.
In bonobo apes De Waal encountered a different kind of society, one that was matriarchal and governed by alpha females. But bonobos, though overlooked historically, stood in exactly the same relationship to humans as chimps – since both differ from us by 1.5 per cent of their genetic complement – so their model was relevant too. The American and Japanese researchers who had studied them before him, in Africa, had described them as “very affectionate”. It took De Waal’s plain speaking to convey to the world that they had a lot of sex. It was their way of keeping the peace.
His research did not go uncriticised. In one 2003 experiment, in which two capuchin monkeys were given different-value rewards for performing the same task (a lowly piece of cucumber or a fancier grape), he and a colleague, Sarah Brosnan, claimed to have elicited a human-like sense of fairness. Other scientists failed to replicate the finding, but by then a video of a monkey hurling the cucumber back at the experimenter had gone viral. It might have been a rare case of the storytelling getting ahead of the science.
In the main, though, De Waal was the one calling out sloppy thinking, and he was drawn to others who did the same. When Clay took him to meet the nonagenarian British philosopher Mary Midgley, who had long argued against human exceptionalism, she says his admiration was palpable. His last book, Different (2022), offered a primatologist’s perspective on the relationship between gender and sex. He waded unflappably into the culture wars.
De Waal was born in s’Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands, one of six sons of a banker, Jo de Waal, and his wife, Cis (nee van Dongen), who ran the family home. With remarkable premonition his parents named Frans after the animal-loving Saint Francis of Assisi, and he spent his childhood weekends in the polders, those low-lying lands reclaimed from the sea, tending a menagerie of mice, frogs and birds.
At school he took tepidly to biology, put off by the dissection classes, until an encounter with the Dutch ethologist and future Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen revealed to him that you could build a career out of watching live animals. De Waal studied zoology and ethology at the universities of Nijmegen, Groningen and Utrecht, obtaining his PhD from Utrecht in 1977 under the mentorship of the respected primatologist Jan van Hooff. De Waal’s dissertation distilled his observations of the chimp colony at Arnhem, where he stayed for six years. Apart from the interlude at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, he spent the rest of his career at Emory’s National Primate Research Center, travelling frequently to Africa and particularly to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to study chimps and bonobos in the wild.
He wrote daily, his wife Catherine acting as literary consultant and critic, and even after his retirement in 2019 his output was prodigious. Besides hundreds of peer-reviewed papers there were the books, which regularly made the bestseller lists and earned him a number of literary rewards. The honour he was proudest of, however, was the Ig Nobel prize – awarded for research that “makes people laugh, then think” – he won in 2012 with a colleague, Jennifer Pokorny, for a paper showing that chimps can recognise each other by their bottoms.
His consummate communication skills were always in demand, meaning he travelled a great deal, but in 2023 a diagnosis of stomach cancer forced him to retreat to the home he shared with Catherine at Stone Mountain, Georgia. He stayed in touch with colleagues, responding to emails within minutes, and at the time of his death he was working on a history of the study of animal behaviour.
De Waal is survived by Catherine (nee Marin), whom he married in 1980, and his brothers, Ferd, Wim, Hans, Vincent and Steven.
• Frans (Franciscus Bernardus Maria) de Waal, primatologist, born 29 October 1948; died 14 March 2024
