NECROLOG

R ALLEN GARDNER

thnologist R Allen Gardner, who has died aged 91, was best known to the public for his ground-breaking work on human-animal communication, particularly his relationship with the chimp, Washoe. This began because of Gardner’s interest in learning how much chimps are like humans. “To measure this accurately, chimps would be needed to be raised as human children, and to do that, we needed to share a common language,” he said. As a result, in 1966 Gardner and his wife Beatrix adopted Washoe, an orphaned 10-month-old chimp originally brought to the US by the Air Force for use in testing, and attempted to bring her up as they would a child. Aware that