1514: Jane Goodall (1934–2025): Pioneering Chimpanzee Researcher and Conservation Icon
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/10/02
How did Jane Goodall’s Gombe research on chimpanzee tool use and social behavior reshape primatology and catalyze global conservation through the Jane Goodall Institute and Roots & Shoots?
Jane Goodall was born on April 3, 1934. It was in London, England. Her parents were Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall and Margaret Myfanwe Joseph, with one sister, Judith. She began her academic career in East Africa after being recruited by Louis Leakey.
She studied wild chimpanzees at Gombe and then at the Gombe Stream Game Reserve in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) in 1960. This established the longest continuous field study of wild chimpanzees.
These were the basis for groundbreaking research into chimpanzees making and using tools, such as termite fishing. This overturned the prior position: Only humans make tools. The observation was made in 1960 and subsequently formalized in scientific publications.
She began PhD studies at Cambridge without an undergraduate degree, under the guidance of ethologist Robert Hinde. Her PhD was awarded in 1965/66. She also observed colobus monkeys and other mammals hunting and eating meat, including inter-group violence in the Gombe Chimpanzee War from 1974 to 1978.
She founded the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977 to sustain the research. Roots & Shoots was launched in 1991 as a global youth program focused on community, wildlife, and environmental projects.
In her life, she married several times. She married Dutch wildlife filmmaker Hugo van Lawick in 1964 and divorced in 1974, and they had one son, Hugo Eric Louis. She married Derek Bryceson in 1975, who died in 1980. Survivors reported are a son and three grandchildren: Merlin, Angel, and Nic, and a sister, Judith.
In her lifetime, she was awarded numerous prestigious honours, including the Kyoto Prize (1990), National Geographic’s Hubbard Medal (1995), the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement (1997), Templeton Prize (2021), and the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom (2025).
She died on October 1, 2025, in California at the age of 91 while on an American speaking tour. She died of natural causes.
Key books:
In the Shadow of Man (1971, Houghton Mifflin)
The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior (1986, Harvard Univ. Press)
Through a Window (1990, Houghton Mifflin)
Reason for Hope (1999, Warner/Grand Central).
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