Thelma Rowell

Thelma Elizabeth Rowell (1935–2024) was a British biologist and zoologist known mostly for her work with monkeys and sheep. She was a professor of zoology at the University of California, Berkeley from 1974 to 1994.

Rowell was known for her field research on Olive baboons in Uganda. Her work challenged the then-prevailing assumptions about baboon society and the "army model" that centered the role of male aggression and hierarchy. She was a key thinker in pushing primatology toward abandoning the idea of a single "primate pattern," which purported to characterize social behaviors across different species and locations. Instead, throughout her career, she emphasized the complexity of animal behavior and the pitfalls of sweeping generalizations.

Among her peers in primatology, Rowell was known as an iconoclast who challenged anthropocentric assumptions about animal behavior. Her contemporaries coined the term "Thelma Effect" to refer to thinking that challenged dogma in their field. Rowell's work was widely appreciated by feminists, but she eschewed identifying or being seen as supporting any particular ideology. (Hinde later advised Jane Goodall, and credited Rowell, along with Goodall and Dian Fossey, with changing his perspective on his work. )

As part of this experimental work, Rowell temporarily removed mothers of rhesus macaque infants and tested their stress responses. She wrote up the findings and submitted them to the Zoological Society of London Journal under the name "T.E. Rowell." The paper was well-received, but when the journal invited its author down to London to give a talk, the realization that Rowell was a woman came as an unwelcome surprise. The Society told her that she would not be able to eat with the fellows due to her sex and needed to sit behind a curtain, out of sight, to eat her meal in private. Rowell declined and, in the words of a biographer, “shared a pork shop at a girlfriend’s flat instead.” Hugh Rowell was offered a position as a university lecturer at Makerere University in Uganda, and the couple moved to Africa in 1962. Rowell decided to apply for a grant to conduct primate field research, an easier inroad to academic work for women at the time, and received a grant from the British government.

The focus of Rowell's research was to compare and contrast the behavior of wild and caged olive baboons.

Rowell saw a different picture. Her baboon males were not very aggressive; in fact, fights were rare enough that she didn’t see any sign of a clear male hierarchy in the wild. Males tended to transfer in and out of her group, whereas the females stayed put. The females grouped themselves along kinship ties and determined the group’s feeding path for the day.

Rowell found the claims of an "army model" for baboon behavior puzzling. Males were said to lead groups and protect the females and infants from predators. Wary of contradicting her predecessors, she suggested that the behavioral differences she observed may have something to do with her group's (unusual) forest habitat in Uganda. Previous baboon studies focused on savanna baboons — perhaps the environment explained the differences? She later came to regret this bit of "professional diplomacy," as it flowered into a myth about the "arcane forest baboon" that took years to undo.

Social Behaviour of Monkeys By the 1970s, Rowell had grown less concerned with contradicting colleagues and more assured in her own field research. Other scientists had documented primate groups that similarly diverged from the classic baboon model. Jeanne Altmann, Alison Jolly, Barbara Smuts, and Shirley Strum all challenged the notion that primates could be summed up with a simple pattern centering male aggression and hierarchy. Altmann’s influential survey of data collection methodology in 1974 drew widespread attention to human bias in observation methods and helped point toward paths for improvement.

In 1972, Penguin published Rowell’s book about her studies in Uganda, The Social Behaviour of Monkeys. The review in Science described it as a “very interesting and stimulating” book that “challenges some old ideas, presents some new theories, and effectively communicates the complexity of nonhuman primates and their social systems.”

“Somewhat to [Rowell’s] horror, the book became very popular among feminists in the 1970s and 1980s," wrote critic Donna Haraway (including herself among the feminist fans). As Haraway acknowledged, Rowell bemoaned any attempts to bend or misrepresent primate behavior to suit human political ends.

Career at Berkeley In 1969, Rowell's husband was offered a faculty position at the University of California, Berkeley, and the family (now with two children) moved to California. At the time, university "anti-nepotism" rules restricting them from hiring multiple members of the same family were common; these rules made it very difficult for women to get tenure-track jobs in higher education. So, initially, Rowell's work at Berkeley was restricted to limited teaching roles; however, she continued to conduct research outside of the university, at the San Francisco Zoo. In the 1970s, with the influence of the Civils Rights movement, anti-nepotism policies ended and Rowell was appointed to the faculty at Berkeley in 1974.

From 1978 to 1981, Rowell taught at the University of Nairobi as part of Berkeley’s exchange program. She promoted the development of primate field studies in the Kakamega Forest, western Kenya. She also encouraged primate-oriented research by Kenyans, two of whom became her doctoral students. By this time, primatology had solidified into a field in its own right, with several dedicated journals and international conferences devoted to the discipline. Rowell found the singling out of primate study — and the assumption that primates are uniquely intelligent animals — problematic. To prove her point, she turned her attention to study some of the most maligned and "silly" mammals, sheep.

Sheep studies

In the late 1980s, Rowell shifted to studying feral sheep in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Sheep, for example, were widely considered mindless, but Rowell found them to have complex communications and sociality. She argued that scientists had studied sheep (and other animals) for very limited commercial purposes, using husbandry practices that bred out natural traits and eliminated individual choice. The prevailing views of sheep behavior were based on scientific practices as methodologically flawed as those of the debunked early baboon studies.

Rowell studied sheep on a family farm after retiring in Yorkshire. From the video documentary "Non Sheepish Sheep" by Didier Demorcy and Vincianne Despret 2005Rowell had a difficult time finding a journal to publish her sheep research, as sheep research at the time was expected to focus on issues such as feed conversion rates — methods to improve agribusiness and boost profits. found that sheep have a female hierarchy, conduct reconciliations, mutual grooming, and intervene in third-party fights, characteristics they shared with primates.

Rowell was not the first scientist to point out human bias in privileging the study of primates over other animals, but her views were nonetheless prescient in capturing what scholars later termed "primatocentricism" or "primate chauvinism."

Critique of primatology After retiring from Berkeley in 1994 and moving back to Yorkshire, Rowell summarized her concerns about primatology in two key papers, both later published as book chapters. Identifying herself as a biologist, she wrote that walling off primates from other animal study has hampered scientific understanding.