Death

Jane Goodall, a renowned primatologist and conservationist, died at age 91 in California.

Context

Goodall was born in London on April 3, 1934, and grew up in Bournemouth with dreams of living in Africa among animals. Her fascination began early when she received a stuffed chimpanzee toy as a child, which she kept throughout her life. Without money for college, she trained as a secretary and worked as a waitress to save for a trip to Kenya in 1957. There she met paleontologist Louis Leakey, who hired her as his secretary and later sent her to study chimpanzees in what would become Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park.

Revolutionary Research

On Wednesday, Goodall passed away from natural causes while on a speaking tour in California.

In 1960, Goodall arrived in Tanzania to begin studying wild chimpanzees, accompanied by her mother as a required chaperone. Her groundbreaking discoveries challenged fundamental scientific assumptions about what separated humans from animals. She observed chimpanzees making and using tools to fish termites from mounds, a behavior previously thought unique to humans.

Scientific Impact

Goodall revolutionized primatology by naming her research subjects instead of numbering them, giving them names like David Greybeard, Fifi, and Flo. She documented complex social behaviors, emotions, and personalities in chimpanzees, showing they could kiss, embrace, hold hands, and show both compassion and violence.

Her approach of immersing herself in their habitat to experience their society as a neighbor rather than a distant observer was considered unorthodox at the time. She earned a doctorate from Cambridge University in 1965.

Conservation Legacy

In 1977, Goodall founded the Jane Goodall Institute to protect chimpanzees and their habitats. The institute grew to have 19 offices worldwide and established programs, including Roots & Shoots, which began with Tanzanian teens in 1991 and now spans over 100 countries.

After attending a 1986 conference where she learned about threats to wild chimpanzees, she shifted from field research to global advocacy. She became a UN Messenger of Peace in 2002 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Biden in January 2025. In April 2024, the then 90-year-old Goodall said she needed to speed up rather than slow down, because she didn’t know how many years she had left to spread her message about climate change, deforestation, and biodiversity loss.