When Jane Goodall first arrived at Gombe Stream Game Reserve in what is now Tanzania in 1960, little was known about the world of chimpanzees. But the 26-year-old secretary would go on to make groundbreaking discoveries through her immersive, unorthodox observations, even as her findings were scoffed at by scientists early on.
In fact, Goodall, who died on October 1, lacked formal academic training, but her approach proved to be key to her method of recording personality traits and naming her subjects, rather than numbering them as tradition dictated at the time.
Goodall couldn't afford to attend college
Born in London in 1934, Goodall had long been fascinated by both Africa and animals, according to Anita Silvey, author of the 2015 biography Untamed: The Wild Life of Jane Goodall. Tarzan books, which of course featured a character named Jane, were among her favorites, along with the Dr. Dolittle series.
“When I was 10, I dreamed of going to Africa, living with animals and writing books about them,” Goodall told CNN in January 2017. “Everybody laughed at me because I was just a girl, we didn't have any money [and] World War Two was raging.”
Unable to afford college and encouraged by her mother to learn typing and bookkeeping, Goodall sought steady employment by attending secretarial school. “She needed to support herself and she and her family felt that with secretarial training, she'd always be able to get a job,” Silvey wrote in Untamed.
Leaky was drawn to her observational skills
Still, Goodall found office work a bore. When a friend invited her on an extended trip to her family’s farm near Nairobi, Kenya, she spent time waitressing to earn money for the voyage. At age 23, Goodall arrived and soon after was offered a job working with famed paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey at a natural history museum. Leakey, according to National Geographic, believed her lack of formal scientific training, along with her passion for animals, would make her the right choice to study the social lives of chimpanzees at Gombe, and Goodall was enthralled by the idea.
“He wanted someone observant and not blinded by scientific theory,” Silvey wrote. “When he took Jane around in a Jeep, he found she could see and name all the animals in the area.”
Another test: Leakey gave Goodall a deck of cards and asked her which were black and which were red by viewing only the backs of the cards. “She couldn't tell him, but did show him all the bent corners,” Silvey explained. “He had run this test a lot of times, often with men, who didn't see the bent corners. In general, Leakey thought women to be more observant than men and chose three women (Goodall, Birutė Galdikas, and Dian Fossey) to research chimps, orangutans, and gorillas.”
In her 2010 book, Jane Goodall: 50 Years at Gombe, Goodall noted that because she didn't attend college, Leakey had trouble securing funding for the research. “Eventually, though, he got a six-month grant from Leighton Wilkie, a Des Plaines, Illinois, businessman with an interest in human evolution,” she wrote. “The British authorities had refused to let a young girl go into the forest alone — so my mother, Vanne, volunteered to accompany me.”
In 1960, Goodall began her observations, giving the chimps names, such as Goblin, Freud, and Frodo.
According to the Jane Goodall Institute,“She took an unorthodox approach, immersing herself in their habitat, experiencing their complex society as a neighbor rather than a distant observer, and defying scientific convention by giving them names instead of numbers... She came to understand them not only as a species, but as individuals with personalities, complex minds, emotions and long-term bonds. Her findings on the tool-making practices of chimpanzees remain one of the most important discoveries in the world of primatology.”
Goodall eventually earned her doctorate degree
With Leakey’s influence, Silvey noted, Goodall entered a doctoral program at Cambridge University in 1962 without an undergraduate degree—one of just a handful to do so, though she was not exactly enthusiastic about it.
“I was only doing this thesis for Leakey’s sake,” Goodall told the BBC in March 2014. “I’d never had an ambition to be a scientist and be part of academia.” She was patronized by her mostly male classmates for giving the chimpanzees names and personalities. “I didn’t give them personalities, I merely described their personalities,” Goodall added. “Some scientists actually said I must have taught them (to use tools). That would have been fabulous if I could have done that.”
And her research methods were often dismissed at Cambridge.
“You can’t share your life in a meaningful way with a dog, a cat, a rabbit and so on, and not know the professors were wrong,” Goodall said at the 2019 One Young World summit in London. “And now animal intelligence, in particular, is something that people are really interested in.”
Goodall earned a Ph.D. in ethology, the science of animal behavior in 1966, and continued her research at Gombe for 20 more years.
“She was at that point the foremost researcher in chimpanzees in the world,” Silvey wrote. “When her doctoral thesis was submitted to the committee (with no name given), one of the members said it had to be sent to Jane Goodall, because she knew more about chimpanzees than anyone.”
Catherine Caruso joined the Biography.com staff in August 2024, having previously worked as a freelance journalist for several years. She is a graduate of Syracuse University, where she studied English literature. When she’s not working on a new story, you can find her reading, hitting the gym, or watching too much TV.
