Jane Goodall has spent 60 years of her life studying chimpanzees behaviour. She first became interested in chimpanzees when she got a toy as a child, as well as from reading Tarzan and Dr Dolittle books.
How she first became interested in chimpanzees
Jane was born on the 3rd April 1934 in Hampstead, London. Her dad bought her a chimpanzee toy called Jubilee. Jane later said that the toy sparked an interest in animals. But her mother’s friends thought it would frighten Jane:
My mother’s friends were horrified by this toy, thinking it would frighten me and give me nightmares.
When she was 8 years old, she read the Tarzan and Dr Dolittle books. These books made her fall in love with Africa and want to work with the animals there.
Out to Africa
In March 1957, Jane went to Kenya to visit a friend who had a farm there. Whilst there, she met Dr Louis Leakey, who offered her a job at a local natural history museum.
Louis believed that studying chimpanzees and other apes, such as orangutans, would help to find out how early humans, known as hominids, behaved.
After working at the museum for several months, Leakey sent her to the Gombe Steam National Park in Kenya to study how chimpanzees behaved. Her mum came with her to keep Jane safe.
Gombe Stream National Park
Jane arrived at the National Park on the 14th July 1960. In the first few weeks of being at the national park, she had a fever that delayed the start of her research.
Once she recovered, Jane started walking around the park to look for chimpanzees. One elderly chimpanzee, who she called David Greybeard, allowed her to watch him. Jane saw David use grass blades to fish out termites from their holes. At the time, many believed chimpanzees didn’t mkake their own tools.
Whilst studying the chimpanzees, she gave each of them names, rather than numbers like other studies. Jane also discovered that, like us humans, chimpanzees had their own personalities, ate other animals and formed close bonds with each other.
Conservation activism
Jane set up the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977 to support chimpanzee research and, later on, campaigning to protect chimpanzees and their habitats.
In 1986, she went to a primate conference where everyone there was talking about deforestation across the world.
A few years later, whilst flying over the Gombe National Park in a small plane, she saw areas of the park that had previously been untouched rainforest destroyed to make way for expanding local villages. Jane decided that she needed to take action to protect the rainforests and the chimpanzees that lived in them. To do this, her institute runs conservation and development programs across Africa.
She has also rescued chimpanzees from medical facilities and helped babies orphaned by the bushmeat trade.
To this day, she still gives speeches and talks to governments and businesses to encourage them to support wildlife conservation.
