Jane Goodall

**Dame Jane Morris Goodall**  (; born **Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall**; 3 April 1934 &ndash; 1 October 2025), formerly **Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall**, was an English zoologist, primatologist, ethologist and anthropologist. She was also the UN Messenger of Peace. She was the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees. Goodall was best known for her 45-year study of social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania. She was the founder of the **Jane Goodall Institute** and has worked extensively on conservation and animal welfare issues.

## Early life 
Born in London, she has been interested in animals since childhood. As a child she was given a lifelike chimpanzee toy named Jubilee by her father; her fondness for the toy started her early love of animals. The reason the chimpanzee's name is Jubilee is because in 1935 there had been a chimpanzee named Jubilee also that was born in London and all of the zoo's chimps had been born in Africa.

The family later moved to Bournemouth, and Goodall attended Uplands School, an independent school in nearby Poole.

She earned her Bachelor of Arts at Newnham College, Cambridge. She later earned her Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy at Darwin College, Cambridge.

## Career
She went to Kenya and met Dr. Louis Leakey there. In 1958, Leakey sent Goodall to London to study primate behavior with two experts. 

Leakey raised funds, and in 1960 Goodall went to Gombe Stream National Park, becoming the first of "Leakey's Angels". She was accompanied by her mother whose presence was necessary to satisfy the requirements of David Anstey, chief warden. He was concerned for their safety; Tanzania was *"Tanganyika"* at that time and a British protectorate. She was the first scientist to name her research subjects instead of giving them numbers.

Leakey arranged funding and in 1962 sent Goodall, who had no degree, to Cambridge University where she obtained a PhD degree in Ethology.

Instead of numbering the chimpanzees she observed, she gave them names such as Fifi and David Greybeard, and observed them to have unique and individual personalities, an unconventional idea at the time. 

She also observed behaviours such as hugs, kisses, pats on the back, and even tickling, what we consider 'human' actions. The chimps would also take twigs from trees and strip off the leaves to make the twig more effective, a form of object modification which is the rudimentary beginnings of toolmaking. Over the course of her study, Goodall found evidence of mental traits in chimpanzees such as reasoned thought, abstraction, generalization, symbolic representation, and even the concept of self. All these were thought to be uniquely human abilities.

### Chimps eating habits
In contrast to the peaceful and affectionate behaviours she observed, Goodall also found a mean side of chimpanzee nature at Gombe Stream. She discovered that chimps will systematically hunt and eat smaller primates such as *Colobus* monkeys.

### Aggression within the troop 
Also startling, and disturbing, was the tendency for aggression and violence *within* chimpanzee troops. Goodall observed dominant females deliberately killing the young of other females in the troop in order to maintain their dominance, She said of this revelation, "During the first ten years of the study I had believed […] that the Gombe Stream chimpanzees were, for the most part, rather nicer than human beings, then suddenly we found that chimpanzees could be brutal that they, like us, had a darker side to their nature". With his position in the Tanzanian government as head of the country's national park system, Bryceson was able to protect Goodall's research project. He put an embargo on tourism at Gombe while he was alive. She had been on a speaking tour in the U.S. and was set to speak in Los Angeles at the time of her death.

## Honours 
In addition to the DBE, Jane received many honours from other countries:
*United Nations Messenger of Peace
*Légion d'honneur (France)
*Medal of Tanzania
*Kyoto Prize (Japan)
*Benjamin Franklin Medal
*Gandhi-King Award for Nonviolence
*Prince of Asturias Award (Spain)
*Genesis Award

In January 2025, Goodall was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Joe Biden.

## Related pages 
*Dian Fossey, a gorilla researcher

## References 
## Other websites
*The Jane Goodall Institute official website
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*Jane Goodall at *Discover Magazine*
*Jane Goodall interviewed by Alyssa McDonald in July 2010 for the *New Statesman*
*Jane Goodall – Overpopulation in the Developing World at *Fora TV*
*Lecture transcript and video of Goodall's speech at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice at the University of San Diego, April 2008
*Jane Goodall extended film interview with transcripts for the 'Why Are We Here?' documentary series.
*A Conversation with Jane Goodall (audio interview)
*"On Being" radio interview with Krista Tippett, broadcast August 2020