Christophe Boesch
Christophe Boesch (11 August 1951 – 14 January 2024) was a French-Swiss primatologist who studied chimpanzees. He often worked with his wife, co-writing articles and co-directing documentaries about chimpanzees.
Born in St. Gallen, Switzerland, Boesch earned a biology degree from the University of Geneva and a Ph.D. from the University of Zurich in 1984; his dissertation was Nut-Cracking Behaviour of Wild Chimpanzees. He later earned a habilitation at the University of Basel in 1994. His first fieldwork began in 1973 studying mountain gorillas in Virunga National Park, under Dian Fossey. In 1976 he started studying chimpanzees in Taï National Park, Côte d'Ivoire, and from 1979 he led a long-running project on their ecology, social life, tool use, hunting, cooperation, food sharing, inter-community relations, and cognitive abilities.
From 1997 he was Director of the Department of Primatology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. He founded the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation and served as its president. Boesch died on 14 January 2024 at age 72.
His work showed that chimpanzees have complex minds: they cooperate, teach their young, and use tools. He argued that animal traditions matter and that captive chimpanzee behavior is not a reliable guide to wild behavior. He and colleagues highlighted how easily humans can spread diseases to great apes, leading to safer tourism and research. His team also used DNA to study chimpanzee mating and social life.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 17:51 (CET).