Alison Jolly obituary

As a postdoctoral student at Yale University in the early 60s, Alison Jolly pioneered in-depth field research on the behaviour and ecology of lemurs in Madagascar. Her life subsequently took her to Cambridge University, the New York Zoological Society, and the universities of Cambridge, Princeton, Rockefeller and Sussex. Throughout these travels, her abiding interest in big questions to which small lemurs might provide answers never wavered and, over the years, her insights transformed our understanding of the evolution of social behaviour.

A steadfast champion of lemur conservation, Jolly, who has died aged 76, was also among the first to argue that conservation must recognise the needs of local people. She nurtured students, too, in Madagascar and beyond, and a whole generation of primatologists and conservation biologists came of age with her encouragement and support.

Ideas first put forward by Jolly in the 1960s and 70s became part of the landscape of evolutionary biology and gave rise to an intellectual genealogy as wide as it is deep. In Lemur Behaviour (1966), she was the first to establish clearly from meticulously reported field observations the odd fact that among the lemurs she studied, females typically had priority over males, upending the longstanding assumption that male primates are always bigger, fiercer and dominant.

In seminal articles after this work, Jolly explored the evolutionary contexts that would favour female priority, and linked her field research with experimental studies of dexterity – or the lack thereof – in captive lemurs to argue that social environment rather than ecological factors drove the evolution of intelligence among primates.

Jolly developed these ideas further in two books, The Evolution of Primate Behaviour (1972) and Lucy's Legacy: Sex and Intelligence in Human Evolution (1999). She never described herself as a feminist, but simply lived a life that led and supported feminism.

Daughter of the artist Alison Mason Kingsbury and the humorist and Cornell scholar Morris Bishop, Jolly was born and raised in Ithaca, New York. She graduated with a BA in zoology from Cornell University, Ithaca, and a PhD in zoology from Yale University. At Yale, she met Richard Jolly, an Englishman also studying for a PhD, and they married in 1963. They lived on both sides of the Atlantic and raised four children, Margaretta, Susan, Arthur and Richard.

Alison's ideas about conservation were much influenced by Richard, a distinguished development economist. Together, they wrote a paper for the 1970 international conference on conservation in Madagascar titled Conservation: Who Benefits and Who Pays? Too controversial to be included in the published conference proceedings, the paper circulated informally instead, opening new ways of thinking and in time helping to establish an approach to conservation that included the needs and aspirations of people as well as the island's unique and endangered natural communities.

In A World Like Our Own: Man and Nature in Madagascar (1980), Jolly simultaneously celebrated the enigmatic riches of the island's natural heritage and offered an unflinching account of the environmental crisis enveloping people and wildlife alike. Here, her encompassing vision, compassion, humour, perceptiveness and ability to combine science and personal experience in wonderfully evocative narrative all came together for the first time. "… Madagascar tells us which rules would still hold true if time had once broken its banks and flowed to the present down a different channel …" No one has said it better, before or since.

Never just a conservation commentator, Jolly also immersed herself in action, from advising the multinational corporation Rio Tinto on the development of the QMM titanium mine on the country's southern coast and, with her Malagasy colleague Hanta Rasamimanana, writing the Ako books about lemurs for children in Madagascar's primary schools, to mentoring a rising generation of Malagasy conservation scientists.

Jolly's genius lay in the creativity of her mind, the acuteness of her eye, a remarkable way with words and the ability to be wholly enthusiastic while delivering blunt home truths. No one who knew her, from first-year students to high-ranking World Bank officials, will forget the warm smile and the lilting, measured voice with which she offered these truths.

At the time of her death Jolly was visiting scientist at the University of Sussex. She was president of the International Primatological Society from 1992 until 1996 and received its lifetime achievement award in 2010. She was awarded a knighthood by the National Order of Madagascar in 1998 and the Osman Hill memorial medal by the Primate Society of Great Britain in 2006. In 2006, a new species of mouse lemur, Microcebus jollyae, was named in her honour, while a parcel of recently restored mining forest in Madagascar was named after her in January this year.

She is survived by her husband, children and four grandchildren.