Geek of the Week -- Toshisada Nishida

 This week's Geek is Japanese primatologist Toshisada Nishida.

Nishida started his career in the early 1960s researching macaques in Japan, but he is most famous for the work he began in 1965, observing chimpanzees in the Mahale Mountains of Tanzania. Working at the same time (but in a different place) as Jane Goodall, he was able to demonstrate that some chimpanzee behaviors were cultural, not innate.  At a time when these great apes were thought to be solitary nomads, his research showed that not only did they live in groups, they were territorial, and would even fight other groups

to defend their territory.  Nishida's meticulous and detailed observations showed that chimpanzees -- who were thought to be less closely related to humans than baboons -- shared many traits with humans, such as tool using, food sharing, territoriality, cooperative hunting, cultural traditions, and the ability to plan ahead and to conceive of others as having thoughts and feelings.  He was also among the first to observe chimpanzees using plants in a medicinal capacity.

Jane Goodall and Toshisada Nishida

For this work, Nishida, along with Jane Goodall, was awarded the Leakey Prize, which recognizes accomplishments in the field of human evolutionary science, in 2008.  He worked to bridge the gaps between Japanese and Western scientists, encouraging his students to write in English to make their discoveries easier to share. He was instrumental in persuading the Tanzanian government to declare the chimpanzees' habitat a national park and lobbied UNESCO to declare the great apes a World Heritage species.  Even after he retired from Kyoto University, he still returned to Mahale to study the chimpanzees, making his final visit in 2009.  Before he died in 2011, he expressed a wish that the work at Mahale would continue for at least another century.

His lifelong dedication to the study of our closest living relatives, his devotion to preserving the environment in which they live, and his enthusiasm for sharing his discoveries with colleagues around the world make Toshisada Nishida a fitting Geek of the Week!

Learn more about Toshisada Nishida:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshisada_Nishida
http://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/publications/articles/Mitani_etal_2012.pdf

Got a geek you'd like us to feature?  Tell us about them here. This term, we are concentrating on Geeks who work with Fabulous Beasts.

Top right photo By Frans de Waal - Plos Biology, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21951490