It was a completely ordinary day, in an entirely extraordinary place, when a young Jane Goodall walked through the forest, notebook in hand, to watch over a community of chimpanzees \u2014 exactly as she had done each day for almost four months.<\/p>\n
Dressed in shorts and sneakers, her blonde hair thrown back in a low ponytail, she climbed trees and scaled grassy hills with her binoculars hanging from her neck. From her vantage point, perched up high, a speck in the rugged terrain, there was no other sign of civilisation.<\/p>\n
While the days were repetitive, zoom out and the situation was remarkable: a 26-year-old woman from England, living in a tent in the middle of what’s now known as Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park, at a time when British women couldn’t apply for a mortgage or loan without a male guarantor.<\/p>\n
Her mission was simple: find chimpanzees and figure out how they live in the wild.<\/p>\n
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Jane Goodall was the first researcher to record the creation and use of tools by animals. (Supplied: Jane Goodall Institute\/Hugo van Lawick)<\/p>\n
On this day, November 6, 1960, she spotted a male chimp she had affectionately named David Greybeard, a nod to the distinctive patch of grey hair around his mouth. Her diary entry detailing what she saw next is matter-of-fact:<\/p>\n
“By the termite hill were two chimps, both male \u2026 I could see a little better the use of the piece of straw. It was held in the left hand, poked onto the ground, and then removed coated with termites. The straw was then raised to the mouth and the insects picked off with the lips.”<\/p>\n
She was the first researcher to record the creation and use of tools by animals, which up until then, were believed to be a uniquely human trait. It was an explosive discovery that would topple the very idea of what separated man from animals and revolutionise how humanity understood its place on Earth.<\/p>\n
For Goodall, who died in California on October 1, 2025, aged 91, it was also vindication.<\/p>\n
“At that time, science had decided that humans, and only humans, were capable of using and making tools,” she told 7.30.<\/p>\n
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The renowned conservationist earned top civilian honours from a number of countries including Britain, France, Japan and Tanzania.<\/p>\n
When she went to Tanzania she had no formal training or university degree. She was also a young woman at a time when the scientific community was overwhelmingly male. Few believed her research would amount to anything, let alone forever change how the human world understood the animal kingdom.<\/p>\n
But that’s exactly what happened. When she sent her observation to her supervisor, famed paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, legend has it that he declared: “Now we must redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as humans!”<\/p>\n
A young girl and her teacher tree<\/p>\n
Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall was born in London on April 3, 1934, to novelist mother Margaret Myfanwe Joseph, who went by Vanne, and businessman father Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall.<\/p>\n
This was the beginning of her lifelong obsession with wildlife, according to Goodall, who said she “was born loving animals”. In interviews<\/a>, she detailed her first real scientific observation: hiding out in the family hen house to find out where the egg came out of the chicken.<\/p>\n Jane Goodall says her love of animals started from the moment she was born.\u00a0 (Supplied: Goodall Family\u00a0)<\/p>\n She was five years old when World War II broke out, and the family moved to Bournemouth, a resort town on England’s southern coast, “just a few steps away from the English Channel”. (At the time of her death, she was living in the same house.). Her father was sent to fight in Singapore, and she would later say she barely knew him.<\/p>\n In her memoir, Reason for Hope, she recalled the song of air-raid warnings, windows rattling as German planes flew overhead, and huddling in the steel-roofed cage that functioned as the family’s air-raid shelter.<\/p>\n “Although my life was still filled with love and security, I was slowly becoming aware of another world altogether, a harsh and bitter world of pain and death and human cruelty,” she wrote.<\/p>\n Goodall was an animal lover from a very young age \u2014 scaring her parents at the age of four when she went missing for hours to later emerge from the backyard chook house where she had been watching how chickens lay eggs.<\/p>\n Jane Goodall has died aged 91. (AP: Jean-Marc Bouju)<\/p>\n She spent hours reading in her favourite tree \u2014 her “own leafy and private world” \u2014 daydreaming of joining the world of The Jungle Book, The Story of Dr Dolittle, and Tarzan.<\/p>\n “I read Tarzan of the Apes, a little tiny second-hand copy that I found in an old bookshop \u2026 and of course, I fell passionately in love with that glorious lord of the jungle,” she recalled. “But he married the wrong Jane. I was very jealous.”<\/p>\n After school, she enrolled in a secretarial college in London, all the while plotting how to get to Africa. By 23, she had enough saved from working as a waitress to visit a friend who lived on a farm outside Nairobi in Kenya.<\/p>\n Coming face-to-face with the animals she had read about left her stunned. Giraffes “are completely unreal creatures,” Goodall said. “When you see one for the first time in the wild close-up, it’s totally magic and \u2026 gosh, I was in Africa!”<\/p>\n Into the forests of Tanzania<\/p>\n But getting to Africa was just the first step.<\/p>\n Shortly after arriving, the plucky 20-something rang up Leakey, who was working to map the early timelines of human evolution.<\/p>\n “I think he was amazed that a young girl straight from England with no degree knew so much because I had done what my mother suggested, I’d gone on learning about Africa,” she said. They met, and Leakey offered her a job on the spot \u2014 as his secretary.<\/p>\n Jane\u00a0Goodall first went to Gombe Stream National Park in\u00a01960 and has been returning ever since. (Supplied: The Jane Goodall Institute)<\/p>\n But first Goodall had a request: she wanted to see Africa.<\/p>\n Leakey obliged and took her to dig for fossils at Olduvai Gorge \u2014 now believed to have been home to some of the first humans. Walking out onto the plains after the dig, rhinos and lions roamed freely. It was as if the books of her childhood had come to life, and Goodall later described it as one of the most magical moments she ever experienced.<\/p>\n Back at camp, Leakey asked if she would go to Tanzania and study chimpanzee behaviour.<\/p>\n Goodall had no academic credentials, but that was exactly the point. In her book, The Ten Trusts, she wrote that Leakey wanted “the observations of a naive mind, uncluttered by the reductionist thinking of ethnologists of the time”.<\/p>\n There was no research she could read to prepare her for the mission. Humans knew virtually nothing about how chimpanzees behaved in the wild.<\/p>\n Tanzania was, at the time, a British colony known as Tanganyika. Authorities forbade Goodall from going unless she went with a companion.<\/p>\n Jane Goodall and her mother, Vanne, in the Gombe.\u00a0 (Supplied: Jane Goodall Institute\/Hugo van Lawick)<\/p>\n Her mother volunteered. “She boosted my morale because in those early days the chimpanzees ran away as soon as they saw me,” Goodall said. “They’d never seen a white ape before. They’re very conservative. They would vanish.”<\/p>\n In 1960 \u2014 just months before the funding for the project was due to run out \u2014 she watched as David Greybeard used grass stems to pull termites from their nest.<\/p>\n “I remember that day as vividly as if it was yesterday,” Goodall said later in life. “I had been told from school onwards that the best definition of a human being was man the tool-maker \u2014 yet I had just watched a chimp tool-maker in action.”<\/p>\n Then she had another major breakthrough: David Greybeard took a palm nut out of her hand.<\/p>\n “He turned and looked directly into my eyes, he reached out, he dropped the nut he didn’t want it, but then he very gently squeezed my fingers,” she recalled on Catalyst on ABC TV.<\/p>\n “It was the perfect communication between him and me using a way of communicating that predates human language.”<\/p>\n As she got to know the chimps, she named them. David Greybeard and Goliath, the head males. Mr McGregor, an older man. Flo, “with her bulbous nose and ragged ears”, and her daughter, Fifi.<\/p>\n Jane Goodall was sent to Tanzania with no formal training or university degree. (Supplied: Jane Goodall Institute\/Hugo van Lawick)<\/p>\n Goodall noted they had individual personalities, and were capable of thinking and having emotions.<\/p>\n Until that time, only humans were thought to have those traits.<\/p>\n She watched the chimpanzees for hours kissing, embracing, patting, shaking their fists, throwing rocks and using tools and weapons.<\/p>\n “I was very shocked when I realised chimpanzees had a dark side to their nature. I thought they were like us but nicer,” she told Catalyst.<\/p>\n “But chimps also show characteristics of love, compassion and altruism.”<\/p>\n The ‘woman scientist’<\/p>\n The discovery catapulted Goodall onto the world stage, but she still faced an uphill battle to be taken seriously as a scientist. Newspaper articles about her findings provide a snapshot of the attitudes of the time.<\/p>\n A 1962 headline from Canada’s The Standard newspaper declared: “Chimp-Watcher Is Young, Attractive and Dedicated”. New York’s Daily News wrote in 1962 that Goodall was a “willowy blonde with more time for monkeys than men” beneath the headline, “Jane Eyes Apes, Spurns Tarzans”.<\/p>\n Two years later, The New York Times<\/a> reported that Goodall was “fragile and blonde, with huge green eyes and a tip-tilted nose, she looks as if she should be pouring tea or watering the roses instead of prowling the bush from dawn to dark studying the behavioural patterns of our furry friends”.<\/p>\n Writing decades later, Goodall reflected on the “sensationalist articles” of the time, “emphasising my blond hair and referring to my legs”.<\/p>\n “Some scientists discredited my observations because of this \u2014 but that did not bother me so long as I got the funding to return to Gombe and continue my work,” she said.<\/p>\n “I had never wanted to be a scientist anyway, as women didn’t have such careers in those days. I just wanted to be a naturalist. If my legs helped me get publicity for the chimps, that was useful.”<\/p>\n Fresh out of the jungle, she began her PhD at the prestigious Cambridge University, becoming only the eighth person to be admitted without an undergraduate degree.<\/p>\n “Leakey told me I had to get a degree. He wanted science to take me seriously,” she told 7.30.<\/p>\n There, she developed a new approach to studying animals, starting from the understanding that chimpanzees were intelligent and social. She continued to give them human names, as she had in the Gombe, rather than numbers, as was typical of the time. She used human emotions to describe her observations.<\/p>\n Jane Goodall at the Gombe Game Research Center, Tanzania, in May 1975. (AP: Supplied\/Press Association)<\/p>\n That approach was met with backlash from professors who told her “she’d done everything wrong”, according to an interview published in The New York Times<\/a>. “I shouldn’t have named the chimps; they should have been numbered. And I couldn’t talk about personality, mind or emotion because those were unique to us,” Goodall said. “But luckily, my dog had taught me otherwise as a child.”<\/p>\n Reflecting on her early career later in life, Goodall said she had to work “10 times harder than the average man” to reach the same level of recognition. “I also realised early on, once I had started to gain some notoriety, that the future careers of many women rested on my shoulders,” she told Rolling Stone in 2020.<\/p>\n Gilbert Grosvenor, the former chair of The National Geographic Society, said Goodall’s trailblazing path for other women scientists was arguably her greatest legacy, noting that “women now dominate long-term primate behavioural studies worldwide”.<\/p>\n Ironically, however, Goodall often said she spent her childhood dreaming as a man.<\/p>\n “Probably because at the time I wanted to do things that men did and women didn’t,” she said.<\/p>\n Jane Goodall in the Gombe.\u00a0 (Supplied: Hugo van Lawick)<\/p>\n Motherhood in the jungle<\/p>\n Just as Goodall never imagined herself as a woman, she also never dreamed about marriage or having a family.<\/p>\n That changed when wildlife photographer Hugo van Lawick was dispatched to her camp in the Gombe to document her research for National Geographic.<\/p>\n She was put off by the idea of a stranger coming into her “little paradise” at first, but by the time he left, she had a fiance. He proposed via a telegram shortly after departing the camp:<\/p>\n “Will you marry me stop<\/p>\n Love stop<\/p>\n Hugo”<\/p>\n The couple were married and had a son, Hugo, in 1967.<\/p>\n Jane Goodall married wildlife photographer Hugo van lawick in 1967. (AP)<\/p>\n Her work in the remote jungle posed a challenge with a young baby. Grub, as he was nicknamed by his family, spent much of his first three years in a protective cage, never far from where his mother was watching over the chimps.<\/p>\n Goodall recalled those early years, when they were both working side by side in the field, fondly. But the couple grew apart as van Lawick had to leave the jungle camp for work, and they eventually divorced in 1974 when Grub was still a boy.<\/p>\n Jane Goodall and her son Hugo, known as Grub, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania. (AP)<\/p>\n “I went with him, but I needed to get back to Gombe,” she told People. “I built up the research station and I had to, that was my thing. So we sort of drifted apart.”<\/p>\n She remarried the following year to the director of Tanzania’s national parks, Derek Bryceson.<\/p>\n But just five years after their wedding, Bryceson died suddenly. “He got this horrible cancer. That was the end,” she said.<\/p>\n Her reasons for hope<\/p>\n Eventually, Goodall shifted her attention away from primates and towards advocacy and conservation more broadly.<\/p>\n But Tanzania, where her career began, was always close to her heart \u2014 quite literally, in the form of an Africa-shaped pendant with a small Tanzanite stone marking her former home.<\/p>\n She founded the not-for-profit Jane Goodall Institute in 1977, initially to support research in the Gombe and conservation of chimpanzees. Today, its mission is to increase understanding of primates through educating young people.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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