PHOTO BY CYRIL RUOSO, COURTESY OF THE JOLLY FAMILY AND UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEXConservationist and lemur expert Alison Jolly died of breast cancer earlier this month (February 6) at home in Lewes, East Sussex, U.K. She was 76 years old.
Jolly was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1937, the daughter of an artist and a professor of romance languages. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Cornell University in 1958 and her PhD from Yale in zoology in 1962, where her interest in lemurs began.
Throughout her life, Jolly spent time in the field in Madagascar, researching ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta) behavior. In 1966, she published a paper in Science in which she proposed that the primates’ social behavior was as important to the development of intelligence as tool making and hunting. That same year, Jolly published a book, Lemur Behavior, detailing her observations that female lemurs are dominant over males.
“This was a real surprise to people in the ’60s,” Patricia Wright, a lemur ...
