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Portrait of Jane Goodall

Science · Biology

Jane Goodall

1934–2025 · British

Primatology; ethology and conservation

Jane Goodall was an English primatologist who, with no degree but backed by the anthropologist Louis Leakey, began studying wild chimpanzees at Gombe Stream in Tanzania in 1960. Her observation that chimpanzees make and use tools overturned the belief that tool-making defined humans, and her long-term study revealed their complex social lives, hunting and warfare. She later became a global campaigner for animal welfare and conservation, and died on 1 October 2025 aged 91.

How to spot them

  • ▸Chimpanzees of Gombe Stream, Tanzania
  • ▸David Greybeard, the chimp seen stripping twigs to 'fish' for termites
  • ▸One of Louis Leakey's three primate researchers (with Dian Fossey and Biruté Galdikas)
  • ▸Jane Goodall Institute (1977) and the Roots & Shoots youth programme (1991)
  • ▸Toy chimpanzee called Jubilee from her childhood

Key discoveries & works

Discovery of tool-making and tool use by wild chimpanzees (1960)

Observed a chimp modifying grass stems and twigs to fish termites from a mound

Long-term field study of chimpanzees at Gombe Stream (1960 onwards)

One of the longest-running studies of any wild animal species

In the Shadow of Man (1971)

Popular account of her first decade among the Gombe chimpanzees

The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior (1986)

Her major scientific monograph on chimpanzee behaviour

Roots & Shoots (1991)

International youth environmental and humanitarian programme she founded

Key ideas

  • Chimpanzees have individual personalities, emotions and complex social relationships
  • Chimpanzees make tools, hunt meat and wage lethal intergroup conflict, blurring the line between humans and other apes

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born in London on 3 April 1934
  • •Louis Leakey responded to her tool-use discovery: 'Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as humans'
  • •Gave chimpanzees names such as David Greybeard, Flo and Fifi rather than numbers
  • •Earned a PhD in ethology from Cambridge in 1965 without having an undergraduate degree
  • •Made a Dame (DBE) in 2003; named a UN Messenger of Peace in 2002
  • •Won the Templeton Prize in 2021 and received the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in January 2025
  • •Died on 1 October 2025 in California, while on a speaking tour of the United States

Drill it — 8 cards

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Sources