A Toy Chimp Named Jubilee
When Jane Goodall was a child, her father gave her a stuffed toy chimpanzee instead of a teddy bear. She named it Jubilee. Her mother's friends were horrified and thought it would give her nightmares. Instead, it sparked a lifelong love of animals. Jubilee was still sitting on her dresser in London as of 2000.
Goodall had always been drawn to Africa. In 1957 she visited a friend's farm in Kenya and found work as a secretary. On a friend's advice, she phoned the archaeologist Louis Leakey, simply hoping to talk about animals.
Leakey had a secret plan. He believed studying living great apes could reveal how early humans behaved, and he was quietly looking for someone to study chimpanzees. He did not say so at first. He hired Goodall as his secretary instead.
Into the Forest, With Mum
Leakey sent Goodall to London to study primate behaviour and anatomy. On 14 July 1960 she arrived at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. She did not come alone. The chief warden worried about her safety, so her mother came along to meet his rules.
At the time, primatology was a field run almost entirely by men. Goodall said women were simply not accepted when she started. By 2019 the field was made up almost evenly of men and women, partly thanks to her example.
In 1962 Leakey sent her to the University of Cambridge, even though she had no university degree. She became only the eighth person allowed to study for a PhD there without a bachelor's degree first. Her doctorate was in ethology, and her thesis covered her first five years with the chimpanzees of Gombe.
The Chimp Who Went Fishing
One day Goodall watched a chimpanzee sitting at a termite mound. He pushed stalks of grass into the holes, then pulled them out covered in clinging termites. He was fishing for his snack. Other chimps stripped leaves off twigs to make better tools.
This was a big deal. Humans had long called themselves "Man the Toolmaker", the only animal that made tools. Leakey answered her findings with a famous line: "We must now redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human!"
She overturned a second belief too. Scientists thought chimpanzees ate only plants. Goodall saw them hunt in groups, cornering smaller monkeys high in the trees and then sharing the meat with others who begged for it. Her work showed that chimpanzees share many traits with us, from using tools to having complex emotions and passing on knowledge across generations.
Names, Not Numbers
In the early 1960s, researchers gave study animals numbers. The idea was to avoid getting attached. Goodall broke the rule and gave her chimpanzees names.
There was David Greybeard, a grey-chinned male who was the first to warm up to her. His friend Goliath was the top male until Mike pushed him aside through cunning and improvisation. Flo was a motherly, high-ranking female with a bulbous nose and ragged ears. Gigi loved acting as the "aunt" to any youngster.
Goodall was criticised for using words like "childhood", "mood" and "personality" for animals. Critics called this anthropomorphism. But she kept describing what she saw: hugs, kisses, pats on the back and even tickling. She said these showed close, loving bonds that could last a life span of more than 50 years. She became the only human ever accepted into chimpanzee society.
Planting Trees and Raising Helpers
In 1977 Goodall founded the Jane Goodall Institute to support the Gombe research and protect chimpanzees. Its youth programme, Roots & Shoots, began in 1991 when 12 local teenagers met her on her back porch in Dar es Salaam. By 2010 it had over 10,000 groups in more than 100 countries.
She opened a sanctuary in the Republic of Congo for orphaned chimps, with over a hundred of them living across three islands. Her TACARE project, nicknamed "Take Care", replanted the hills around Gombe and trained nearby farmers. She even teamed up with NASA to use satellite images to fight deforestation.
She kept moving. As of 2004 she travelled nearly 300 days a year. She wrote 32 books, 15 of them for children, and her first big book was translated into 48 languages. In 2015 the United States classified all chimpanzees as endangered after her institute's petition.
