Dutch-American primatologist and ethnologist Frans de Waal died Thursday evening at the age of 75 in Atlanta, Georgia (United States), from metastatic stomach cancer, according to information confirmed by his family to the Dutch daily NRC, Sunday March 17. The American University Emory, where he taught, also published his obituary.
Born in 1948 in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands, the scientist, who had been a corresponding member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1993, was admitted to the National Academy of Sciences (American Academy of Sciences). in 2004. In 2007, the American weekly magazine Time had included him on its list of “100 most influential people.”
His first book (The Politics of the Chimpanzee, Odile Jacob), published in 1982, revealed the Machiavellianism of chimpanzees, whose society is strongly hierarchical, in the process “shattering” the representations of the differences between animal and human being, specifies ‘university.
“The fact that we humans feel so elevated compared to apes has an obvious cause,” Frans de Waal explained to Dutch media NRC in 2006: “We are far too distracted by our language. These great apes simply don’t talk. »
His latest book, published in 2022 (Differents, Les Liens qui liberates), tackled the often controversial question of gender. Combining scientific erudition, field observations and more personal notes, he once again questioned the significance of the differences and similarities with the great apes, from whom around fifteen million years of evolution separate us – the human lineage and that of chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest cousins, diverged more than seven million years ago.
