Jane Goodall, primatologist and friend to chimpanzees, dies at 91

Jane Goodall had no scientific training, not even a college degree when, at 23, she saved up money to visit a friend in Kenya. She was a London secretary and sometimes waitress with a restless spirit and a romantic fixation on animals and Africa based mostly on the “Doctor Dolittle” and “Tarzan” novels of her childhood.

An encounter in Nairobi with the eminent paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey altered the course of her life, setting her on an unlikely path to becoming the world’s foremost primatologist. Her startling observations about chimpanzee behaviors – from making tools to making war – revolutionized not only scientific understanding of the capabilities and inner lives of our simian cousins, but also long-held notions about what it means to be human.

Goodall, whose research prompted a transformation in the ways scientists study social behavior across species, has died at 91. Her death was announced Wednesday by the Jane Goodall Institute, which said she was in California for a speaking tour. Additional details were not immediately available.

In a career spanning more than half a century, Goodall used her global fame to draw attention to the plight of dwindling chimpanzee populations and, more broadly, to the perils of environmental destruction.

The pivotal figure in Goodall’s career was Leakey, whose research had established that Africa was the cradle of man, the place where homosapiens evolved. He said that great apes contained important clues about the behavior of early hominids. And he said that women, whom he perceived as more patient and less threatening than men, were well suited to observe them.

Leakey, working as curator of a natural-history museum in Nairobi, was smitten with Goodall when they met in Nairobi in the late 1950s. He hired Goodall as his secretary, then invited her along on his next dig at Olduvai Gorge, where she proved her mettle amid the wild animals. It was also during that weeks-long expedition without a shower that she began wearing a ponytail, a stylistic trademark she would keep long after her hair turned from blond to gray.

Shortly after the team returned to Nairobi, Leakey invited Goodall to lead a new chimp research project. He saw her inexperience as an asset that gave her a “mind uncluttered and unbiased by theory.”

He asked Goodall to go into the forests of what was then Tanganyika (later Tanzania) and observe chimpanzees. She set up camp beneath oil palm trees near the sand-and-pebble shore of Lake Tanganyika, one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world.

She made her earliest critical observations several months later, in fall 1960, crouching in the woods of the Gombe Stream Reserve. She watched a chimpanzee she had named David Greybeard feast on a freshly killed baby bush pig, a meal that contradicted the widely held assumption that chimps were strict vegetarians.

Days later, she saw David insert a long blade of grass in a termite mound, then withdraw the stalk. The grass was covered with termites, and the chimp devoured them.

That simple task – a seemingly throwaway gesture – proved a revelation. Her research, published in the journal Nature in 1964, sent shock waves through the worlds of animal behavior and anthropology. Goodall had seen an ape create and use a tool – behavior that was thought at the time to be an essentially human trait.

“Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man,’ or accept chimpanzees as humans,” Leakey wrote to Goodall in a cable after receiving word of her finding.

The discovery marked the start of a career that would span more than half a century and distinguish Goodall as the first scientist to engage in such a methodical, long-term study of wild chimps. While previous researchers had focused almost entirely on chimps in captivity, Goodall engaged in methodical, long-term studies in the wild. Her research at the Gombe Stream Reserve showed that tenacious field observation could be more revealing than laboratory experiments, the evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould later said, calling her work with chimps “one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements.”

Chimps were not the unfeeling, unintelligent creatures that people had long assumed. Goodall’s work showed that they were individuals, with emotions and loyalties and disagreements. They kissed. They took care of each other. They went to war. They passed down lessons, one generation to the next.

“The longer I was there, the more like us I saw that they were,” Goodall told an audience of schoolchildren in 2016. “We’ve been so jolly arrogant to think we’re so special.”

The world came to know Goodall through documentaries and magazine photographs that captured her relationships with the animals she watched, loved and lived alongside. There she was, barefoot and unafraid, feeding bananas to the chimpanzees as she mapped their social lives. There she was, comfortable in the wilds of Africa, interpreting the irresistible mystery of our closest ancestors.

She stayed in Gombe nearly full-time for the better part of three decades, establishing a research program that continues today.

Goodall was not the only woman Leakey tapped to study apes; later, he sent the American Dian Fossey to study gorillas in Uganda and the German-born Biruté Galdikas to study orangutans in Indonesia. The three of them, sometimes called “Leakey’s Angels,” showed legions of young women that they could become scientists.

“For me as a little girl, seeing this brave young woman going out and living in the wilds of Africa and being determined to make it work was just an incredible inspiration,” said Elizabeth Lonsdorf, a professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania who has conducted research at Gombe for two decades. She said that even now, female undergraduates still say it was Goodall who sparked their interest in field biology.

When Goodall began her work, female field scientists were so uncommon that a British commissioner for Tanganyika refused to allow Goodall to stay at Gombe unless she was accompanied by an escort. She chose her mother, Vanne.

Even after her important finds, the male-dominated scientific establishment largely dismissed Goodall as a wisp of a woman who insisted on naming her research subjects, a practice regarded as unacceptably sentimental and anthropomorphic.

And she made mistakes. The bananas Goodall used to entice the animals sparked fights among chimps and baboons as the animals competed for the food, leading to questions about whether the fruit had made the chimps at Gombe more aggressive than their counterparts elsewhere.

Goodall eventually stopped the feeding, saying that she would not have introduced bananas to Gombe if she had understood the consequences.

But she succeeded in revolutionizing primatology and field biology perhaps because of – not in spite of – her lack of training.

The same impulse that led her to name her research subjects also led her to see the animals as individuals, and she documented the extraordinary range of their emotions and personalities.

“She has made the most important contributions of any primatologist in history,” said Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford professor who studies baboons, using Goodall’s model of long-term field observation. “She’s simply the patron saint of the field.”

A house full of women

Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall was born in London on April 3, 1934. Her father, an engineer who dabbled in professional car-racing, was mostly absent from family life. She grew up in a house filled with women: her mother, nanny, grandmother, two aunts and a younger sister, Judy.

“I do not remember a time when I was growing up anybody ever saying to me: ‘Well, you can’t do that because you’re a girl,’ ” she told the London Independent in 2003.

They lived in Bournemouth, on the sea in the south of England, where she was fascinated by the natural world. She kept a small zoo of pets – caterpillars, racing snails, guinea pigs, birds, cats and dogs – and at age 4, she conducted her first field observation, hiding in a henhouse for hours, patiently waiting for the chance to see how a chicken could possibly manage to lay an egg.

Her fantasies about Africa grew out of the books she loved as a child, including Hugh Lofting’s children’s books about Dr. Dolittle and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan novels. She fell in love with Tarzan and was horribly disappointed when she learned, as she later put it, that “he had married the wrong Jane.”

Unable to afford college, she moved to London after high school and held a series of secretarial jobs until she had earned enough to buy her passage to East Africa to visit a high school friend whose family had a farm near Nairobi.

To stay on, Ms. Goodall found work as a typist for a British construction firm. She introduced herself to Leakey, who was then in his 50s, and their first meeting turned into a two-hour tour of the collections at the museum where Leakey worked.

Leakey also was widely known for his wandering eye. He had an extramarital affair with his previous secretary, and he made advances toward Ms. Goodall that she managed to rebuff while still preserving her opportunities on the chimp program, according to her biographer, Dale Peterson. Leakey biographer Virginia Morell wrote that the paleontologist would up having an “intimate” relationship with Ms. Goodall’s mother, with whom he also collaborated on several writing projects.

Leakey remained an important champion for Ms. Goodall, helping to secure grants for her chimpanzee research before she had established a reputation of her own. He also urged her to get a doctorate. She enrolled in the University of Cambridge and received a PhD in ethology, or animal behavior, working on her dissertation whenever she could pry herself away from research at Gombe.

In 1961, National Geographic – a major funder of the work at Gombe – sent Dutch photographer Hugo van Lawick to capture Ms. Goodall’s work there. The shared intensity of their adventure in the isolated forests and their mutual thrall to chimpanzees culminated in their marriage three years later.

They cut their honeymoon short when they received word that Flo, Gombe’s matriarch and one of Ms. Goodall’s most beloved chimps, had given birth to a baby. (When Flo died in 1972, her obituary – written by Ms. Goodall – became the first nonhuman obituary to appear in the London Sunday Times.)

Ms. Goodall and van Lawick had a son, Hugo, whom they nicknamed “Grub.” He spent much of his early childhood at Gombe, sleeping in a specially designed cage to keep out marauding chimpanzees. The marriage disintegrated as Ms. Goodall’s career accelerated. She presented research at international conferences, and her 1971 book “In the Shadow of Man” was an instant bestseller that was translated into dozens of languages.

While estranged from her husband, Ms. Goodall began a relationship with Derek Bryceson, a British colonial administrator of Tanzania’s national parks. They were married for five years before Bryceson’s death from cancer in 1980.

Information on survivors was not immediately available.

Ms. Goodall endured turbulent patches in her work. For many years, finances at Gombe were precarious, and she worried that the research project would not survive. She also faced questions about whether she adequately responded to an armed raid of her research camp in 1975. Dozens of rebels from Zaire (now Congo) kidnapped four student researchers, including three from Stanford, holding them for several weeks until their families paid nearly half a million dollars in ransom.

Ms. Goodall disputed an oft-repeated claim that she had been warned by a local of the approaching guerrillas and escaped by slipping into the forest. She said she had been asleep in bed some distance from the kidnapping and did not know of it until after it occurred.

She apologized in 2013 for a dozen passages that were lifted from various websites and appeared in her book that year, “Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder from the World of Plants.”

Any missteps were overshadowed by the goodwill she generated as a globe-trotting eco-celebrity, a second phase of her career that began in 1986 when she attended an international conference of primatologists in Chicago.

She heard her colleagues speak about the risks apes faced – dwindling habitat, growing human populations and a rise in bushmeat hunting. The population of chimpanzees had plummeted from more than 1 million in the 1960s to about 400,000.

Almost immediately, she felt an imperative to leave behind her life as a solitary field researcher and became a traveling crusader for conservation. The Jane Goodall Institute, based in Vienna, Virginia, became a vehicle for her sprawling conservation efforts, addressing the well-being not just of apes but also of people.

The institute established and runs sanctuaries for orphaned and injured chimps, and it helps communities around Gombe conserve the local habitat and create sustainable jobs. It also serves as the hub for Roots and Shoots, a youth program meant to help children become activists; founded in 1991 with a dozen children from Tanzania, it now reaches more than 100,000 children in more than 100 countries.

In 2002, Ms. Goodall was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace. Two years later, she was knighted in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace. In 2025, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Into her 80s, Ms. Goodall traveled 300 days a year, endeavoring to forge an emotional connection between her audiences and the wild creatures to whom she had devoted her career. She highlighted the tolls of deforestation by big timber companies and the dangers posed by commercial hunters who slaughtered hundreds of gorillas each year in Cameroon alone.

“People just grow up thinking the forests and animals will last forever,” she told the Globe and Mail of Canada in 2001. “I’m just trying to change attitudes toward animals. It’s very simple, really, I just want to change the world a little. Will I ever achieve it? No. But that’s what one works toward.”