Jane Goodall, Legendary Primatologist and Anthropologist, Dies at 91
She was considered the world’s leading expert on chimpanzees and was renowned for her global conservation efforts
Jane Goodall, Legendary Primatologist and Anthropologist, Dies at 91
She was considered the world’s leading expert on chimpanzees and was renowned for her global conservation efforts
Jane Goodall visiting a chimpanzee rescue center in 2018 in Entebbe, Uganda
SUMY SADURNI / AFP via Getty Images
Jane Goodall was just 26 years old when she first stepped foot onto the pebbly shore of what’s now Gombe Stream National Park in July of 1960. Though she lacked any formal scientific training, she nonetheless was about to embark on a rare six-month-long field study to observe the elusive chimpanzees living in the Tanzanian forest. Though researchers knew at the time that humans and chimps were closely related, they knew next to nothing about the behavior of the apes in the wild.
For three months, Goodall traipsed through the forest, avoided predators and navigated across difficult terrain without making any meaningful observations. Dense leaf growth prevented her from seeing the animals at a distance, and when she attempted to approach the chimps for a closer view, they fled from her.
But Goodall was patient, and she eventually managed to gain the trust of a high-ranking male chimp with silver facial hair who she named David Greybeard. Finally, in November the same year, she made an astonishing observation: David Greybeard had bent a twig, stripped off its leaves and used it to “fish” termites from a nest. The ability to use and make tools was previously thought to be what set humans apart from other animals.
When she told her mentor, famed archaeologist Louis Leakey, what she saw, he responded: “Now we must redefine tool, redefine man or accept chimpanzees as human.”
“She was a pioneer,” says Craig Stanford, an anthropologist and biologist at the University of Southern California and the co-director of the USC Jane Goodall Research Center. “At a time when people thought a long study was six weeks, she went out and spent months and then years, really being immersed in the community of chimps, seeing it from the inside. Nobody had really thought about that before.”
Primatologist, conservationist and naturalist Jane Goodall has died at age 91 of natural causes, as her namesake nonprofit, the Jane Goodall Institute, announced in a social media statement on Wednesday. She had been in California as part of an ongoing speaking tour in the United States.
“Goodall’s discoveries as an ethologist revolutionized science, and she was a tireless advocate for the protection and restoration of our natural world,” reads the statement.
Goodall holds a baby monkey while visiting Chile.
HECTOR RETAMAL / AFP via Getty Images
Goodall was considered the world’s leading expert on chimpanzees and was renowned for her global conservation efforts. Her decades-long work documenting chimp behavior in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park fundamentally changed our understanding of primates. Not only did she discover that chimps make tools, but her research into the social lives of these primates challenged long-held beliefs that humans are the only species to wage war, manipulate objects and have sophisticated emotions.
Goodall also helped re-center conservation efforts around meeting both the needs of local communities and the environment in an approach called “TACARE,” an acronym for Lake Tanganyika Catchment Reforestation and Education. The Jane Goodall Institute has put 3.4 million acres of habitat under conservation action plans and has worked with 130 communities living in or near chimpanzee habitat.
As one of the most well-known naturalists in the world and one of the first women to rise to the top in the field of primatology, Goodall inspired generations of young women to pursue careers in science. She spearheaded programs in Uganda and Tanzania to help girls stay in school by offering scholarships, providing them with the training and materials to make reusable sanitary pads and creating a peer support network.
Goodall was born in 1934 in London. Ever since she was a child, she recalled having a fascination and love for animals. She would spend hours watching squirrels, birds and insects in the garden of her house. Once, when she was about 4, she disappeared to a henhouse for hours to figure out how the birds laid their eggs, unaware that her family had reported her missing to the police.
Her reading list was filled with books like Doctor Dolittle and Tarzan of the Apes. (Later in life, she often joked that Tarzan had married the wrong Jane.) After first reading about Tarzan’s adventures in the jungle, a then 10-year-old Goodall dreamed of traveling to Africa to live and work among wild animals.
“Everybody laughed at me,” she said in an interview. “Girls didn’t do that sort of thing back then, but my mother always said if you really want something then you’re going to have to work really hard, take advantage of opportunity and never give up.”
Her opportunity came about five years after she graduated from high school. Goodall attended secretarial school, working several jobs to save up money. By 1957, she had earned enough to buy her boat passage to Kenya, where she visited a school friend on her family’s farm.
During that trip, she arranged to meet with archaeologist Louis Leakey in Nairobi. Leakey’s secretary had quit two days prior to their meeting, and he promptly hired Goodall as a replacement, she wrote in The Book of Hope.
Around that time, the archaeologist, who had gained fame for his human origins research, was looking for someone to undertake an extended observation of great apes in Gombe, thinking the animals could be a window into the lives of early humans. Goodall’s patience and desire to understand animals convinced Leakey she was the right fit for the job. Though she lacked formal scientific training, Leakey believed this would help her make unbiased observations.
“He told me that the chimpanzee habitat was remote and rugged and that there would be dangerous animals—and that the chimpanzees themselves were four times stronger than humans,” Goodall said. “Oh, how I longed to undertake an adventure like the one Leakey was envisioning.”
So, in 1960, Goodall set out to the forest of Tanzania—a highly unorthodox venture for a young woman at the time. Authorities had insisted she have a companion with her, so her mother, 54-year-old Margaret (“Vanne”), went along. The two shared a single tent furnished with cots, a table and chairs.
Goodall broke decades of scientific research precedent by naming the chimpanzees instead of using numbers to identify them—a highly controversial practice that irritated conventional academics. When she suggested that chimpanzees have distinct personalities, she was criticized for anthropomorphizing them.
Goodall’s study of the chimps in Gombe extended more than 60 years and led to multiple discoveries, including that chimps are omnivorous, exhibit human-like compassion and have deep mother-infant bonds.
“Because she was in Gombe for so long, we learned about generations of chimps,” says Mary Lee Jensvold, a primate communication scientist at Central Washington University. “We learned about things that you could only discover by being there for a long time, like warfare between neighboring communities.”
In 1961, Goodall was one of only a few students to enter into a Cambridge University PhD program without first earning her bachelor’s degree. After graduating, she continued her work in Tanzania and helped establish the Gombe Stream Research Center.
Goodall’s career pivoted from research, following the “Understanding Chimpanzees” conference she helped organize in Chicago in 1986. The sessions she attended left her in shock—while she had heard of the effects of deforestation and the inhumane conditions chimps faced in medical research labs, she “had no idea the extent of it,” she said to Living on Earth’s Steve Curwood in 2020.
“I went as a scientist,” she said. “I left as an activist.”
Goodall left behind her research at Gombe and began traveling the world to build conservation programs, give lectures and promote environmentalism.
“She had this epiphany that the research was great, fascinating, but ultimately didn’t matter if the animals go extinct,” says Stanford. “So then from that point on…she was on this global mission to save those animals.”
Stanford met Goodall back in the 1980s, after he sent her a letter proposing a project to study chimps and the animals they eat. Goodall liked his idea, and he went to Tanzania to complete the research. In the 1990s, he spent six years working part-time in Tanzania and living with Goodall until he built his own house on the shore of Lake Tanganyika. Most of the time when she came to Gombe, Stanford remembers Goodall was often out with CNN, “60 Minutes” or other film crews that were following her life.
But in the brief moments he’d spend working alone with her in the forest, Stanford remarked that he was always struck by how she quickly picked up on chimpanzee behaviors he’d never noticed, even in a year of watching them. “Jane was just a brilliant observer,” he says. “That’s something that is critical for anybody who's a primatologist.”
Goodall was an incredible champion who was relentless in the work she did, says Jensvold, who’s also the associate director of the Fauna Foundation. The Fauna Foundation cares for former biomedical research chimps, including some that came from the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates (LEMSIP) in New York after it was shut down in 1997.
Jensvold recalls when Goodall visited LEMSIP in the 1980s and saw the conditions in which the chimps were kept. Goodall told the lab the chimps needed enrichment activities—a new concept at the time—and helped send one of Jensvold’s graduate student classmates to the lab to teach technicians enrichment techniques. Goodall’s involvement often led to action.
“Because she was so influential,” Jensvold says. “She wasn’t afraid to talk about what was going on in labs, and that this is making them crazy.”
While the conference in 1986 led Goodall to move from research into full-time activism, the famed primatologist had already founded the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977 to continue her chimpanzee research and work toward chimp protection, conservation and environmental education. Her work focused heavily on centering local communities in conservation and helping with access to food, health care and education.
“As outsiders, it’s very easy to say ‘oh, don’t eat bush meat, or ‘don’t do this, and don’t do that,’ until you really see the lives and daily struggles of these people,” says Melissa Hawkins, the curator of mammals at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. “I think it’s really amazing the work that she’s done to kind of fill that void and show the rest of the world, for decades now, how important it is to not just blame the people but figure out ways to help.”
Goodall created an initiative through the institute in 1991 called Roots and Shoots, which empowers youth to make positive changes for the environment and surrounding communities. Her work in conservation and human rights led the U.N. Secretary-General to name her a U.N. Messenger of Peace in 2002. In 2004, she became a Dame Commander of the British Empire. Throughout her illustrious career, she received numerous other awards and honors, including the Kyoto Prize, the French Legion of Honour and the Medal of Tanzania.
Goodall speaks to a crowd in South Africa.
Theo Jeptha / Die Burger / Gallo Images via Getty Images
In addition to her conservation and primatology prowess, those who knew Goodall say she had a natural charisma that people immediately took note of.
“She had a certain energy,” Stanford says. “I won’t say spiritual, but some kind of a metaphysical energy about her that everybody sensed.”
Stanford recalls once being with Goodall in Chicago. He was sitting with her at a sidewalk café when a middle-aged woman spotted Goodall, stopped abruptly and started to cry. This wasn’t the only time Stanford had witnessed such a response to her presence.
“When you see other people’s reaction, it’s so viscerally, deeply emotional, it really tells you—it reminds you—what she means to so many people,” he says. “She’s not just a celebrity. She’s not just an environmentalist. She’s not just a pioneering scientist. She’s this cultural touchstone who represents something pure and good that she devoted her life to.”
Though shy and soft-spoken, Goodall always spoke out about climate change and humans’ unhealthy relationship with the planet. She used her own story to inspire people to act on the environment.
Goodall often talked at length about her own spirituality, which she said grew while spending time out in the forest and feeling the divine energy and interconnectedness of all living things. This spiritual power guided Goodall on her mission to spread hope and peace throughout the world, she said.
Some years ago, during a lecture, Goodall was asked what her next great adventure would be. Then in her 80s, Goodall thought for a second before replying: “dying.” The crowd went silent, then a few people “tittered nervously,” she said in 2022.
But Goodall continued: “When you die, there’s either nothing, which is fine, or there’s something, which I happen to believe,” she said. “And if there is something beyond our death, then I cannot think of a greater adventure than finding out what that something is.”
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