Jane Goodall

Ethologist

• Born: April 3, 1934
• Place of Birth: London, England

British primatologist and ethnologist Jane Goodall is best known for her groundbreaking work observing chimpanzee behavior in the wild. She has made significant contributions to the study of animal behavior, as well as to causes related to conservation and animal welfare.

Primary field: Biology

Specialty: Zoology

Early Life

Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall was born on April 3, 1934, in London, England. As a child, she showed an interest in the animals on her grandparents’ farm, and her favorite books (The Jungle Book, Dr. Doolittle, and the Tarzan stories) featured animals as main characters. By the time she was ten years old, she was already dreaming of Africa, a dream that her mother encouraged.

Goodall’s parents divorced when she was twelve years old. As a single mother of two daughters, Vanne Morris-Goodall could not afford to send Jane to college, and instead she suggested that Jane attend secretarial school. Vanne thought that secretarial skills would enable her daughter to take a job anywhere in the world. After graduating, Jane worked as a waitress, a secretary, and a production assistant for a film company, but the dream of Africa was never far from her mind. When a school friend invited her to visit her family’s farm in Kenya, the twenty-three-year-old Goodall eagerly accepted.

Shortly after arriving in Nairobi in 1957, Goodall took a secretarial job and soon set up an appointment to meet internationally renowned paleontologist and anthropologist Dr. Louis Leakey. Goodall asked Leakey about his studies and encounters with animals, and by the end of the meeting, Dr. Leakey hired Goodall as his personal secretary. He invited her to join him and his wife, Mary, on a fossil dig at Olduvai Gorge in Tanganyika (now Tanzania).

Upon returning to Kenya, Goodall took a job at a Nairobi museum, but Dr. Leakey was convinced she would be the perfect observer for a group of chimpanzees near Lake Tanganyika. He was planning in-depth field studies of each of the great apes (chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas), and he felt that women researchers would be more observant and less threatening than men to the animals they were watching. Leakey even considered Goodall’s lack of formal training to be an asset, as it would not interfere with her observations. She agreed to participate and she became, along with Biruté Galdikas who studied orangutans and Dian Fossey who studied mountain gorillas, part of the female contingency of primatologists, an area that became one of the few scientific fields with as many women scientists as men.

As Goodall set out for Gombe National Park in Tanganyika in 1960, it was the beginning of the longest field research study of an animal group in history.

Life’s Work

Tanganyikan and British authorities were not as enthusiastic about Goodall’s arrangement as Leakey had been. They believed a single European woman in the bush would be in great danger, and they refused to allow her to enter Gombe National Park alone. Goodall’s mother agreed to join her daughter, and Goodall began her study in the summer of 1960.

Initially, the chimpanzees were wary of her presence and would scatter whenever she got too close. She spent her first three months at Gombe allowing the chimpanzees to become accustomed to her, often watching them through binoculars from a distance. Over time, she gave many of them names: David Greybeard, Passion, Fifi, Flo, and Goliath.

In October 1960, Goodall witnessed something that would challenge the accepted ideas about chimpanzees. Through binoculars, she observed a chimpanzee she had named David Greybeard pluck a long blade of grass from the ground and stick it into a termite mound. After he left, she ventured to the mound herself; after sticking a blade of grass in the hole she discovered that it was covered with termites, common food for chimpanzees. She had just learned that chimpanzees could use tools and that they modified tools to suit their needs, which were things completely unknown to Western science. Shortly after witnessing David Greybeard use the blade of grass as a termite scoop, Goodall watched another chimpanzee strip the leaves off of a branch and use it in a similar manner.

Due to Goodall’s lack of formal scientific training, she approached her subjects in a nonscientific manner. Whereas traditional study protocol would have a scientist assigning the chimpanzees numbers, Goodall gave them names. She viewed the chimpanzees in human terms and attributed human characteristics and emotions to them. She noted that individual chimpanzees had different personalities and that chimpanzees had a humanlike social structure with nurturing mothers, playful children, and family bonds.

Goodall’s findings about violent and aggressive tendencies in chimpanzees, including cannibalism and territorial wars, were judged more harshly than her discovery of other humanlike qualities in chimpanzees. Because humans and primates share 99 percent of the same DNA, some scientists urged Goodall to suppress her information, fearing it would justify war and violence in humans as genetically predetermined.

The unorthodox findings that Goodall reported from Gombe were controversial in the scientific community, but the National Geographic Society found them interesting enough to fund her studies when Goodall’s initial funding ran out after six months. National Geographic sent photographer Hugo van Lawick to chronicle Goodall’s work; van Lawick and Goodall married in 1964. The couple had a son, Hugo Eric Louis, but they divorced in 1974. Goodall later married Derek Bryceson, the head of Tanzania’s national parks, in 1975; Bryceson died of cancer only five years later.

When Goodall’s research findings were scrutinized by the scientific community as being unprofessional and unreliable, Leakey arranged for her to obtain a PhD in ethology, the study of animal behavior, at Cambridge University in England. The school accepted her field study and experience in lieu of undergraduate degrees, and though Goodall met repeated opposition from her dissertation committee for what they considered her “nonobjective” style, she received her degree in 1965.

In the decades after Goodall began her studies in Gombe, she gained not only respect and legitimacy within the scientific community, but iconic stature. Primatologists, anthropologists, and graduate students in ethology have conducted field studies at the camp in Gombe. In 1975, however, Zairian rebels (in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) invaded the camp and kidnapped four students. They were later released unharmed, but the event almost caused the camp to permanently shut down.

Goodall has dedicated her life to the study of chimpanzees, later spending less time in the field and more time on the lecture circuit. In 1977, she founded the Jane Goodall Institute with the aim of providing continual funding for chimpanzee field research. The mission statement of the institute is to educate and empower individuals to make a difference through conservation and environmentalism, thus creating a better environment for all living creatures. This is especially vital to the wild chimpanzee population, whose numbers dropped from 2 million in 1900 to less than 300,000 in the early twenty-first century. It is believed that the decline is a result of poachers selling chimpanzees to zoos, hunters selling meat to African markets, and environmental problems such as pollution, the clear-cutting of forests, and global warming destroying chimpanzee habitats.

Among the programs sponsored by the Jane Goodall Institute is Roots & Shoots, which encourages young people to make positive changes and improve life for animals, humans, and the environment. Members complete hands-on projects in their communities ranging from planting trees, picking up garbage at local parks, and supporting local animal shelters. With international reach, the program operated in at least seventy countries by the 2020s, and Goodall remained heavily involved.

Another Goodall Institute program is TACARE (pronounced “take care”), which targets rural African villages and promotes education. It is TACARE’s aim to improve health and education, encourage smart agriculture, and engender respect for the environment.

From the early 1990s on, Goodall often spent nearly three hundred days a year on the road, lecturing in classrooms and at universities around the globe. Beginning in 1986, she had not been to Gombe for longer than three weeks. After many years without a public appearance, she agreed to appear at the Ninth World Wilderness Congress in Mexico in November 2009. The event included lectures and workshops on environmental conservation efforts worldwide. From that point, she continued traveling, appearing at speaking engagements, and otherwise remaining involved in environmental activism and conservation efforts.

Impact

Named a UN Messenger of Peace in 2002, Goodall has received multiple honorary degrees from international universities and has earned numerous awards or special recognitions by organizations such as the National Geographic Society and Disney’s Animal Kingdom. In 2021, she was honored for her years of work with the Templeton Prize. She has been the subject of several movies and research films, including programs for the BBC, PBS, and National Geographic. The Apple TV+ series Jane, which premiered in 2023, was inspired by Goodall's life and career. In a nod to her efforts to positively influence younger generations, toy company Mattel also introduced a carbon-neutral Goodall Barbie doll made from recycled materials as part of its "Inspiring Women Series."

Goodall is also the author of several groundbreaking books, many of which have been translated into other languages. Among them are My Friends the Wild Chimpanzees (1967), In the Shadow of Man (1971), The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior (1986), and the children’s books My Life with the Chimpanzees (1988) and The Chimpanzee Family Book (1989). In 2021's The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times, Douglas Abrams recounts a recent visit and dialogue with Goodall.

Bibliography

Barnett, Rosalind C., and Caryl Rivers. "Jane Goodall Still Leads the Way." Psychology Today, 17 June 2024, www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/a-womans-place/202406/jane-goodall-still-leads-the-way. Accessed 3 July 2024.

Brodwin, Erin. "The Heartbreaking Reason Jane Goodall Stopped Doing What She Loved Most in the World." Business Insider India, 16 Apr. 2015, www.businessinsider.in/the-heartbreaking-reason-jane-goodall-stopped-doing-what-she-loved-most-in-the-world/articleshow/46950364.cms. Accessed 22 Sept. 2015.

Goodall, Jane. My Life with the Chimpanzees. Rev. ed. Aladdin, 1988.

Goodall, Jane. Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe. First Mariner, 2010.

Goodall, Jane. "'Young People Are Changing the World': Dr. Jane Goodall on the New Apple TV+ Series 'Jane' and Her Message That We Can All Make a Difference." Forbes, 14 Apr. 2023, www.forbes.com/sites/marianneschnall/2023/04/14/young-people-are-changing-the-world-dr-jane-goodall-on-the-new-apple-tv-series-jane-and-her-message-that-we-can-all-make-a-difference/. Accessed 3 July 2024.

Latson, Jennifer. "How Jane Goodall Made a Scientific Breakthrough without a College Degree." Time, 14 July 2015, time.com/3949985/jane-goodall-college-history/. Accessed 22 Sept. 2015.

Lewis, Tanya. "Post Chimp Work, Jane Goodall's Passion for Conservation Still Going Strong." Live Science, 17 Apr. 2015, www.livescience.com/50515-jane-goodall-chimpanzees-conservation-gmos.html. Accessed 22 Sept. 2015.

Peterson, Dale. Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man. Houghton, 2006.

Thompson, Claire Elise. "Jane Goodall's Legacy of Empathy, Curiosity, and Courage." Looking Forward, Grist, 3 Aug. 2024, grist.org/looking-forward/jane-goodalls-legacy-of-empathy-curiosity-and-courage/. Accessed 3 July 2024.