Jane Goodall was a British naturalist and activist who became the world's leading expert on chimpanzees. She died on October 1st 2025, aged 91.
Goodall did not attend university, completing a secretarial course instead. From childhood she was entranced by the natural world, heavily influenced by her Tarzan books, and told everyone she was going to live in Africa with the animals. She went to Kenya in 1957.
Goodall began fieldwork at the instigation of Louis Leakey, a paleoanthropologist searching for a common ancestor of both apes and humans. She worked chiefly in the Gombe reserve along Lake Tanganyika, spending more than 25 years in direct study of chimpanzees. Her notes were meticulous and her sojourns with the chimps so intense that she became the leading expert on them.
Her most significant discovery came when she observed a chimpanzee called David Greybeard using a grass stem to extract termites from a nest, and on another occasion using a twig from which he had stripped the leaves. This was the first observation of tool preparation and use by a non-human primate. Until then, making tools was thought to be a defining feature of humans; the observation shook anthropology.
Goodall insisted on naming the chimpanzees rather than giving them numbers, which was the accepted scientific procedure. She argued they were individuals with personalities.
Among her other observations: chimpanzees, though mostly fruit-eaters, also hunted and ate meat; they slept in individual leafy nests high in the trees, woven afresh every day; and after fights they made gestures of conciliation. She and her first husband, Hugo van Lawick, who had been sent to photograph her work for National Geographic, observed many gestures that looked human with the same meaning: the pat on the back, the clenched fist, tickling, nods.
In 1990, on a trip to Gombe, Goodall was horrified to see that land outside the reserve had been destroyed—the trees gone, the soil sterile, the villagers struggling to survive. She gave up direct science in favour of activism, arguing that everything was connected: animals, people and land. She had become vegetarian in the 1960s after being suddenly horrified that the pork chop on her plate implied fear, pain and death.
In 1991 she founded Roots & Shoots, a programme engaging schoolchildren in projects to help animals, their neighbours or the land. The programme spread to more than 75 countries, and she spent 300 days a year travelling the world to check on progress.
In 2002 she was made a UN messenger of peace.
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