There are an abundance of terms that can be used to describe Jane Goodall—scientist, activist, conservationist, humanitarian, primatologist, ethologist—but none may be more fitting than pioneer. Traveling to what is now called Gombe National Park in Tanzania to study chimpanzees in July 1960 was a decision that would lead her to change the world forever.
It did not take long for Goodall to gain an affinity for animals. At just four years old, she snuck into an empty henhouse and waited four hours to see a hen lay an egg. Despite being so worried that she had called the police, Jane’s mother did the opposite of what many would have and encouraged her daughter’s scientific curiosity and love of nature. This led to Goodall spending her afternoons climbing trees and connecting with her surroundings for hours on end.
Reading the Tarzan and Dr. Dolittle series sparked a love of Africa and dreams of traveling to work with the animals she read about. Unable to afford college, she worked years to save up for a 1957 trip to Kenya visiting a friend’s family farm. This is where she met paleoanthropologist Dr. Louis Leakey, who decided to send her to what was then called the Gombe Stream Game Reserve to study wild chimpanzees.
In addition to Goodall’s passion for animals, Leakey felt her lack of formal training would allow her to study chimpanzees with an open mind removed from the preconceptions formed by the scientific culture of the time. Dian Fossey and Birutė Galdikas were recruited by Leakey under the same notion to study gorillas and orangutans, respectively. These three women would later be referred to as The Trimates.
When Goodall arrived at Gombe, it was a tumultuous few months before her first breakthrough. Despite spending hours in the forest daily, every chimp would run away from her. Jane continued to work on treating them as peers—going as far to mimic their behavior—rather than study subjects, and finally a high-ranking older chimpanzee trusted her enough to let her stay around him. She named him David Greybeard, going against the common scientific practice of not naming subjects. Greybeard combined blades of stiff grass and used it as a tool to stick into termite holes to fish for termites. Jane’s observation was significant because until this point, scientists defined humans by their ability to make and use tools. Having seen chimpanzees making and using tools, this forced scientists to redefine what makes humans human or classify chimpanzees as humans. By doing the very things academics stated not to—not getting attached, not feeding them, not interacting with their infants—Goodall began to make huge discoveries.
Finding funding through this initial discovery, Jane would stay at Gombe for another 25 years. She also completed her Ph.D. in 1966 at Cambridge University. Through her time, she uncovered that chimpanzees, believed to be vegetarians, are omnivores that actively hunt for meat. Goodall observed the process by which mothers nurture their young and help them learn how to live in the world on their own. She discovered that chimpanzees have an intricate social system with families, alliances, territories, and that they use at least twenty different sounds to communicate.
In 1977, she founded the Jane Goodall Institute to support research in Gombe and help protect chimps in their natural habitats. However, it was not until a primatology conference in 1986 when Jane Goodall found that the problems of deforestation and declining chimpanzee populations across Africa were far worse than she thought. This initialized her journey as a conservationist and activist, with her first course of action being to help the quality of life of chimps held at medical research facilities in disastrous conditions. She set up refuges for chimps freed from these facilities or those orphaned by the bushmeat trade. Jane became an advocate for protecting animals, spreading hope and saving the environment. In 1991, a group of young people confiding in her led to them co-founding Roots & Shoots, an organization with chapters in over 140 countries that works to bring together youth to work on environmental, conservation, and humanitarian issues.
“You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.” – Jane Goodall
