Jane Goodall

• 1. Introduction

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  Jane Goodall was the reason Louis Leakey once declared that scientists must now, in his words, "redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human." He wrote that after Goodall showed him something she had witnessed inside Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. The finding would eventually force a rethink of what separates humans from every other animal on Earth. It would also carry Goodall far past the quiet observer role she started in. How did she end up in that forest in the first place? What darker truths did she later uncover about the very chimpanzees she had grown to love? And what disputes, over her research methods and over the causes she took up, would follow her for the rest of her life?

• 2. A Phone Call To Kenya

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  Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall was born in April 1934 in Hampstead, London. Her father, Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall, worked as a businessman, and her mother, Margaret Myfanwe Joseph, wrote novels under the pen name Vanne Morris-Goodall. The family later moved to Bournemouth, where Goodall attended Uplands School, an independent school in nearby Poole. As a child, her father gave her a stuffed toy chimpanzee named Jubilee instead of a teddy bear. Goodall said the toy sparked her early love of animals. She recalled that "my mother's friends were horrified by this toy, thinking it would frighten me and give me nightmares." Jubilee was still sitting on Goodall's dresser in London as of 2000.

  In 1957 Goodall traveled to a friend's farm in the White Highlands, in what was then the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya. She found work there as a secretary and, on a friend's advice, telephoned Louis Leakey, the Kenyan archaeologist and palaeontologist. Leakey wanted a chimpanzee researcher but kept that plan to himself, and instead offered Goodall a job as his secretary. He believed that studying living apes could reveal clues about the behaviour of early hominids. After his co-researcher and wife, the palaeoanthropologist Mary Leakey, approved the plan, Leakey sent Goodall to Olduvai Gorge in Tanganyika, later part of Tanzania.

  In 1958 Leakey sent Goodall to London to study primate behaviour with Osman Hill and primate anatomy with John Napier. Leakey raised the necessary funds for her trip. On the 14th of July 1960 Goodall arrived at Gombe Stream National Park, becoming the first of what would later be called the Trimates. David Anstey, the park's chief warden, was concerned for their safety, so Goodall's mother accompanied her to satisfy his requirement. Goodall credited her mother with encouraging her to pursue primatology, a field dominated by men at the time. Goodall later said women were not accepted in the field when she began her research in the late 1950s. Primatology became split almost evenly between men and women, partly thanks to Goodall's trailblazing work and her encouragement of young women to join the field.

  In 1962 Leakey arranged funding to send Goodall, who had no university degree, to the University of Cambridge. She became the eighth person ever permitted to pursue a Cambridge doctorate without first earning a bachelor's degree. Goodall attended Newnham College, Cambridge, to study for a Doctor of Philosophy in ethology, awarded in 1965. Her thesis, supervised by Robert Hinde, examined the behaviour of free-living chimpanzees. It was completed in 1966 and detailed her first five years of study at Gombe.

  On the 19th of June 2006 the Open University of Tanzania awarded Goodall an honorary Doctor of Science degree. In 2019 she became an honorary fellow of both Newnham College and Darwin College, Cambridge, and received another honorary doctorate. None of those honours existed yet when Goodall first climbed into the hills above Gombe to begin watching the Kasakela chimpanzee community.

• 3. What The Termites Revealed

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  "It isn't only human beings who have personality, who are capable of rational thought and emotions like joy and sorrow." Goodall said this of her Gombe subjects. Goodall also documented behaviours long assumed to be uniquely human, including hugs, kisses, pats on the back, and even tickling. She argued the gestures showed "the close, supportive, affectionate bonds that develop between family members and other individuals within a community." Those bonds, she said, "can persist throughout a life span of more than 50 years."

  At a termite mound, Goodall watched one chimpanzee repeatedly push stalks of grass into the holes, then pull them out coated with clinging insects. The behaviour became widely known simply as termite fishing. The chimpanzees also stripped twigs of their leaves to make them more effective tools, an early form of toolmaking. Humans had long distinguished themselves as "Man the Toolmaker," a title Goodall's fieldwork now undercut. Her fieldwork also overturned the assumption that chimpanzees were strict vegetarians.

  In 1993 Goodall wrote that using words like 'childhood,' 'adolescence,' 'motivation,' 'excitement,' and 'mood' during the early 1960s had drawn heavy criticism. She broke further from convention by giving the chimpanzees names rather than numbers. Numbering subjects was the standard method, meant to prevent researchers from growing emotionally attached. She said suggesting chimpanzees had 'personalities' was seen as an even greater sin, one she called anthropomorphism. This closeness helped her become, by many accounts, the only human ever accepted into chimpanzee society.

  Among the chimpanzees Goodall named was David Greybeard, a grey-chinned male who was the first to grow comfortable around her. Goliath, a bold-natured friend of David Greybeard, was originally the group's alpha male, until Mike displaced him through cunning and improvisation. Other named chimpanzees included Humphrey, a big and domineering male. Gigi, a large and sterile female, acted as an affectionate 'aunt' to young chimps and humans alike. Flo, a motherly, high-ranking female known for her bulbous nose and ragged ears, raised children named Figan, Faben, Freud, Fifi, and Flint. Frodo, Fifi's second-oldest child, grew into an aggressive male who attacked humans, including Goodall herself. Frodo's aggression toward humans was only a preview of a far more violent side of chimpanzee life that Goodall would soon document.

• 4. The Chimpanzees' Dark Side

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  Goodall once admitted that for her first ten years at Gombe, she had believed something that soon proved false. She had thought the Gombe chimpanzees were, in her words, "for the most part, rather nicer than human beings." Then, she said, researchers found that chimpanzees "could be brutal, that they, like us, had a darker side to their nature." Goodall also observed dominant females deliberately killing the young of other females in the troop, at times resorting to cannibalism.

  Goodall later described the Gombe Chimpanzee War, fought between 1974 and 1978, in her 1990 memoir. The book's full title was Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe. Her findings on this conflict added further evidence that chimpanzees and humans share complex social behaviour.

  Goodall discovered that chimpanzees systematically hunted and ate smaller primates, including colobus monkeys. In one hunt she watched, a group of chimpanzees isolated a colobus monkey high in a tree and blocked every escape route. One chimpanzee then climbed up, captured the monkey, and killed it. The others shared pieces of the carcass with troop members who begged for a portion. At Gombe, chimpanzees came to kill and eat as much as one-third of the park's colobus population every year.

  In 1991 Margaret Power published a book arguing that feeding stations set up to attract Gombe's chimpanzees had distorted their natural behaviour. Power suggested the artificial feeding, not the chimpanzees' true nature, had produced the aggression Goodall called a 'war' between groups. Goodall acknowledged that feeding increased aggression but insisted it changed only the intensity of conflict, not its underlying nature. She also argued that feeding had been necessary to make the study possible at all. Craig Stanford of the University of Southern California's Jane Goodall Research Center said studies without artificial feeding rarely observe such social behaviour at all. Crickette Sanz, in Congo's Goualougo Triangle, and Christophe Boesch, in Ivory Coast's Taï National Park, saw less aggression in their own chimpanzee studies. Other researchers, including Jim Moore, disputed Power's conclusions, and some feeding-free studies elsewhere still documented aggression similar to Gombe's. In a November 2017 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Goodall admitted she would not use feeding stations today. She explained that "there was absolutely no knowledge back then that chimpanzees could catch human infectious diseases." These disputes over her methods did not stop Goodall from turning her research station into a global conservation network.

• 5. Building A Global Movement

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  In 1977 Goodall founded the Jane Goodall Institute to support the Gombe research and to protect chimpanzees and their habitats globally. The organisation grew to include nineteen offices worldwide and became known for community-centred conservation programmes across Africa.

  In 1991 the Institute's youth programme, Roots and Shoots, began when twelve local teenagers met Goodall on her back porch in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The teenagers wanted to discuss problems they had witnessed firsthand and that concerned them deeply. Roots and Shoots eventually grew into a global network with more than ten thousand groups across over one hundred countries.

  In 1992 Goodall founded the Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Centre in the Republic of Congo to care for chimpanzees orphaned by the bush-meat trade. The centre eventually housed more than a hundred chimpanzees across three islands.

  In 1994 Goodall launched the Lake Tanganyika Catchment Reforestation and Education project, known as TACARE or 'Take Care.' TACARE reforested the hills around Gombe while teaching neighbouring communities about sustainable agriculture. The project also gave young girls in the area access to reproductive health education and college scholarships.

  Handwritten notes, photographs, and data had piled up at Goodall's home in Dar es Salaam by the mid-1990s. This prompted the creation of a dedicated archive at the University of Minnesota to organise the material. On the 17th of March 2011 Duke University spokesman Karl Bates announced the archives would move to Duke, overseen by anthropology chairman Anne E. Pusey. Pusey had previously managed the archives in Minnesota and had worked alongside Goodall in Tanzania.

  In 2018 and 2020 Goodall partnered with her friend Michael Cammarata on natural product lines through Schmidt's Naturals and Neptune Wellness Solutions. Five percent of every sale from those product lines benefited the Jane Goodall Institute. As of 2004 Goodall devoted nearly all her time to advocacy, travelling almost 300 days a year. She also served on the advisory council of Save the Chimps in Fort Pierce, Florida, the largest chimpanzee sanctuary outside Africa. Goodall also sat on the advisory board of the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks. From 2022 until her death, Goodall served on the board of the Nonhuman Rights Project, extending her reach into the wider fight for animal rights.

• 6. Campaigns And Convictions

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  In 1986 the Understanding Chimpanzees conference, hosted by the Chicago Academy of Sciences, shifted Goodall's focus from observation toward wider conservation activism. She became president of Advocates for Animals, an Edinburgh-based organisation campaigning against animal use in medical research, zoos, farming, and sport. In June 2008 Goodall resigned that presidency, a role she had held since 1998, citing a schedule too busy to continue. She explained simply, "I just don't have time for them."

  In her 2009 book The Inner World of Farm Animals, Goodall wrote that farm animals are 'far more aware and intelligent than we ever imagined.' She had been a vegetarian for ethical, environmental, and health reasons for most of her adult life. She added that despite being 'bred as domestic slaves,' they 'deserve our respect' and asked, 'who will plead for them if we are silent?' In 2021 Goodall became a vegan and wrote a cookbook titled Eat Meat Less.

  Goodall's foundation worked with NASA, using Landsat satellite imagery to address deforestation harming chimpanzees in West Africa. In 2000 Goodall co-founded Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals alongside Professor Marc Bekoff. In 2008 she gave a lecture titled 'Reason for Hope' at the University of San Diego's Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice. That same year she urged the European Union to end medical research on animals and to fund alternative research methods instead. She once called Edinburgh Zoo's new primate enclosure a 'wonderful facility.' She said the monkeys there fared better than wild ones in an area like Budongo. In Budongo, she noted, about one in six monkeys gets caught in a wire snare. In countries like Congo, she added, chimpanzees, monkeys, and gorillas are shot for food commercially. Goodall also served as a patron of the population concern charity Population Matters and as an ambassador for Disneynature.

  In 2010 the Jane Goodall Institute joined other groups, including the Wildlife Conservation Society, to petition for chimpanzees to be listed as endangered. The Humane Society of the United States joined that coalition as well. In 2015 the US Fish and Wildlife Service accepted the petition and classified all chimpanzees, including captive ones, as endangered. In 2011 Goodall became a patron of the Australian animal protection group Voiceless. She said she had worried about factory farming's environmental harm and about, in her words, "the shocking ongoing cruelty perpetuated on millions of sentient beings."

  In 2012 Goodall served as a challenger for the Engage in Conservation Challenge with The DO School, working with young social entrepreneurs on biodiversity awareness. In 2014 she wrote to Air France executives, calling the airline's transport of monkeys to laboratories 'cruel' and 'traumatic.' That same year she wrote to the US National Institutes of Health, criticising its maternal deprivation experiments on baby monkeys. Ahead of the 2015 UK general election, Goodall endorsed the parliamentary candidacy of the Green Party's Caroline Lucas. In 2015 she also signed a letter to Members of Parliament opposing Prime Minister David Cameron's plan to amend the Hunting Act 2004.

  In August 2019 Goodall was honoured with a bronze sculpture in Midtown Manhattan, part of the Statues for Equality project alongside nine other women. In 2020 Goodall urged that ecocide, the mass destruction of nature, be made an international crime. She said, "the concept of Ecocide is long overdue." That same year she vowed to plant five million trees as part of the World Economic Forum's one trillion tree initiative. In 2021 Goodall called on the European Commission to abolish the caging of farm animals. Also in 2021 Goodall joined the Rewriting Extinction campaign, which used comics to address the climate and biodiversity crisis. She contributed to its anthology, The Most Important Comic Book on Earth, published on the 28th of October 2021. Her willingness to take unpopular positions on captivity did not stop her from holding equally unconventional beliefs about the natural world beyond chimpanzees.

• 7. Faith, Bigfoot And A Scandal

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  In 2012 the Huffington Post asked Goodall whether undiscovered primates such as Bigfoot might be real. She replied, "I'm fascinated and would actually love them to exist." Goodall added that it was "strange that there has never been a single authentic hide or hair of the Bigfoot." Still, she said, "I've read all the accounts." She also discussed the possibility of cryptids such as the Yeren in various interviews and public debates.

  Goodall was raised in a Christian congregationalist family and, as a young woman, took night classes in Theosophy. Her family attended church only occasionally until a new minister, Trevor Davies, arrived when Goodall was a teenager. She recalled that Davies "was highly intelligent" and that his sermons were "powerful and thought-provoking," adding, "I fell madly in love with him." After that, she said, no one had to encourage her to attend services.

  By the time Goodall reached Cambridge at age twenty-seven, her beliefs were settled enough that her atheist and agnostic colleagues did not sway them. In her 1999 book Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey, Goodall described a mystical experience she had at Notre Dame Cathedral in 1977. She wrote, "I cannot believe that this was the result of chance," concluding that she had to "believe in a guiding power in the universe." In September 2010 she said she did not know exactly who or what God is, but felt "some great spiritual power," especially out in nature. When The Guardian asked that year if she still considered herself Christian, Goodall answered, "I suppose so; I was raised as a Christian." In 2017 Goodall wrote the foreword to The Intelligence of the Cosmos, a book by the philosopher Ervin Laszlo. In it she described "an unknown and unknowable Creator, a Supreme Being, a Great Spiritual Power."

  In 2013 Goodall wrote Seeds of Hope with Gail Hudson, a book about the role trees and plants play in the world. Hachette Book Group withheld the book after a Washington Post reviewer found sections copied without attribution. The copied material reportedly came from websites about organic tea and tobacco, an amateur astrology site, and other web pages. Goodall apologised, saying, "It is important to me that the proper sources are credited." She added that she would "work diligently" with her team "to address all areas of concern." The book was released on the 1st of April 2014, after the addition of 57 pages of endnotes. Goodall later blamed her "chaotic note taking" for the plagiarism accusations and revised the book after the allegations surfaced. Long before these controversies, Goodall had already built a private life, including two marriages that shaped her years in the field.

• 8. Marriage, Loss And A Legacy

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  On the 28th of March 1964 Goodall married Baron Hugo van Lawick, a Dutch nobleman and wildlife photographer, at Chelsea Old Church in London. During the marriage she was known as Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall. The couple had a son, Hugo, nicknamed Grub, born in 1967, before divorcing in 1974. The following year, in 1975, Goodall married Derek Bryceson, a former member of Tanzania's parliament and director of the country's national parks. Bryceson's position allowed him to protect Goodall's research project and to impose an embargo on tourism at Gombe. He died of cancer in October 1980.

  Goodall had been diagnosed with prosopagnosia, a condition that made it difficult for her to recognise familiar faces. She said dogs, not the chimpanzees she studied, were her favourite animal. Goodall lived in Bournemouth, England.

  Goodall died in her sleep of cardiac arrest on the 1st of October 2025, at a friend's home in Beverly Hills, California. She was 91 years old and had been on a speaking tour across the United States. Her death fell exactly 45 years to the day after her husband Bryceson's death. Tributes followed from Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. The former US vice president Al Gore and the former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau also paid tribute. The comedian Ellen DeGeneres, the actor Leonardo DiCaprio, and UN Secretary-General António Guterres offered tributes as well. In October 2025 Netflix released the first episode of Famous Last Words, featuring an interview Goodall had given to Brad Falchuk.

  In the 1995 New Year Honours, Goodall was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire for "services to zoology." In the 2003 Birthday Honours she was promoted to Dame Commander of the same order, for "services to the environment and conservation." Her investiture took place at Buckingham Palace in 2004. In April 2002 UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan named Goodall a United Nations Messenger of Peace. Her other honours included the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, the French Legion of Honour, and Tanzania's Order of the Torch of Kilimanjaro. She also received Japan's Kyoto Prize, the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science, the Gandhi-King Award for Nonviolence, and Spain's Prince of Asturias Award. The Walt Disney Company honoured Goodall with a plaque on the Tree of Life at Disney's Animal Kingdom, alongside a carving of David Greybeard. She was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. In 2010 the musicians Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds held a benefit concert at Washington's DAR Constitution Hall. The concert, called 'Gombe 50,' celebrated fifty years of her chimpanzee research. Time magazine named Goodall one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2019, and she received the Templeton Prize in 2021. On the 31st of December 2021 Goodall guest-edited BBC Radio 4's Today programme and chose Francis Collins to present Thought for the Day. In 2022 she received the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication. In April 2023 she was made an Officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau in a ceremony in The Hague, the Netherlands. In October 2024 Goodall delivered 'A Speech for History' at UNESCO. In January 2025 US President Joe Biden awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In December 2025 PETA posthumously named her Person of the Year, honouring what it called her 'legacy of kindness.'

  Stevie Nicks wrote the song 'Jane' in 1990 to celebrate Goodall's life and work. It became the final track on Nicks's 1994 album Street Angel. On the 3rd of March 2022 the Lego Group released set number 40530, A Jane Goodall Tribute, featuring a Goodall minifigure and three chimpanzees. In 2022 Mattel released a Barbie doll of Goodall made from recycled plastic, shown in field attire with binoculars and a notebook. In 1987 the cartoonist Gary Larson drew a Far Side cartoon showing two grooming chimpanzees joking about 'that Jane Goodall tramp.' The Jane Goodall Institute's lawyers called the cartoon an 'atrocity' in a letter to Larson, but Goodall herself later found it amusing. She named it her favourite depiction of herself in popular culture and wrote the preface to The Far Side Gallery 5. In 1988 Larson visited Goodall's research facility in Tanzania, where he was attacked by the chimpanzee Frodo. The Simpsons parodied Goodall in a 2001 episode through the character Dr Joan Bushwell, and Goodall voiced herself in a 2019 episode. She also voiced herself in an episode of The Wild Thornberrys, later adapted into a children's book by Kiki Thorpe. In February 2021 Apple TV+ ordered Jane, a children's programme based on Goodall's work, which ran for three series. Goodall appeared as herself in its final episode, broadcast on the 18th of April 2025. After her death, it was announced that the filmmaker Richard Ladkani was working on a documentary about her life. Ladkani's planned film would add to a body of work that, by one count, already numbered more than 40 films about Goodall.