Dame Jane Goodall (1934–2025) was an English primatologist (an expert on primates). She was best known for her 45-year study of the lives of chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania. (Gombe is north of Kigoma on the shore of Lake Tanganyika). In 1977, she established the Jane Goodall Institute as part of an effort to protect chimpanzees and their habitats in the wild. She also worked on conservation and animal welfare issues.

Early life

Jane Goodall was born in London, UK, on 3rd April 1934. She was fascinated by animals from an early age, and just after her first birthday her father gave her a toy chimpanzee. Jane named the lifelike chimp Jubilee. She spent much of her childhood in Bournemouth, and loved to watch the birds and animals near her home, making notes and sketches.

​​​​​​​After reading Hugh Lofting’s The Story of Dr Doolittle, Jane decided she would go to Africa one day to study the animals there.

To Kenya

Jane left school in 1952 and found work as a secretary at Oxford University, and with a film-making company in London. When a friend invited Jane to visit the family farm in Kenya in 1956, Jane leapt at the chance. It was in Kenya that Jane met Louis Leakey, the famous palaeontologist (fossil scientist) and anthropologist (someone who studies humans, past and present). Leakey hired Jane as an assistant, and soon she was excavating human fossils in the Olduvai Gorge with Leakey’s wife, Mary, also an anthropologist.
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Leakey had been looking for someone with the necessary qualities to do a long-term study of wild chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream Reserve, Tanzania. Despite Jane’s lack of formal qualifications, Leakey was so impressed with her knowledge and enthusiasm that he offered her the job, and she accepted.

Ground-breaking research

Jane began her studies in the Gombe Stream Reserve in 1960. For the first few months she was accompanied by her mother, Vanne, because the authorities refused to allow a woman to go into the Africa forests alone. At first the chimps fled whenever she approached. But gradually her patience paid off, and the chimps allowed her to observe them.
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Jane became aware that the chimps—to whom she gave actual names, such as Goliath, Flo and David Greybeard, rather than the more conventional numbers—had distinct personalities and formed relationships with each other. Her research also showed that chimpanzees were not only highly intelligent, they were also were toolmakers; at the time it was believed only humans could make and use tools. She observed a chimp carefully inserting twigs into a termite mound, then removing them—covered with termites, which it ate.
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Goodall also witnessed chimps, once thought to be vegetarian, participating in co-ordinated hunts for colobus monkeys. Within chimp troops, she also observed females deliberately killing—even eating—their own young in order to maintain their dominance. In her book, Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe, Goodall describes a brutal conflict that took place between different troops over territory.

Marriage and doctorate

In 1962, a Dutch wildlife photographer called Baron Hugo van Lawick was sent to Tanzania by National Geographic to film Jane at work. Two years later Jane married Hugo; their son, also called Hugo (and nicknamed "Grub"), was born in 1967. National Geographic documentaries and articles in the media introduced Jane’s work to a worldwide audience. At the same time, Jane began work on a doctorate from Cambridge University. It was extremely unusual for someone without a college degree to be allowed to study for a PhD, but Jane was awarded her doctorate in ethology (the study of animal behaviour) in 1966.
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Throughout this time, Jane continued her studies in Gombe, and in 1967 she and Hugo set up the Gombe Stream Research Centre to allow other students to help with the research. She and Hugo divorced in 1974, and a year later Jane married Derek Bryceson, director of Tanzania’s national parks. They remained happily married until Derek’s untimely death from cancer in 1980.

Jane Goodall Institute

During the 1980s, Jane’s work increasingly took her away from Gombe as she realised the urgent need to protect the chimpanzees’ forest environment. The Jane Goodall Institute, set up in 1977, works with young people and local communities to promote the conservation of chimps and their habitat. Its youth programme, Roots and Shoots, which began in 1991, has thousands of groups all over the world.
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