Jane Goodall

Dame Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall, known as Jane Goodall, was an English primatologist and anthropologist. Many publications called her "the world's preeminent chimpanzee expert." She died on 1 October 2025, at the age of 91.

She was best known for more than six decades of field research on the social and family lives of wild chimpanzees. She studied the Kasakela chimpanzee community at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. Beginning in 1960, she worked under the guidance of the palaeontologist Louis Leakey. Her research showed that chimpanzees share many important traits with humans. These include using tools, having complex emotions, forming lasting social bonds, engaging in organised warfare, and passing knowledge from one generation to the next. This changed the old idea that humans are very different from other animals.

Goodall earned a PhD in ethology from the University of Cambridge in 1965. In 1971 she published her first book-length study, In the Shadow of Man, which was later translated into 48 languages. She founded the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977 to promote wildlife conservation. In 1991 she started the Roots & Shoots youth programme, which grew into a worldwide network. She also set up wildlife sanctuaries and reforestation projects in Africa, and she spoke up for the ethical treatment of animals in animal testing, animal husbandry and captivity.

Over her career, Goodall wrote 32 books, 15 of them for children. She remained active as a lecturer and travelled widely to promote conservation and climate action. She was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace in 2002. In 2003 she became a dame commander of the Order of the British Empire, an honour given to her by Queen Elizabeth II. She also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the United States, among other honours. From 2022 until her death, she served on the board of the Nonhuman Rights Project.

There is also an Australian author with a similar name, Jane R. Goodall.

Early life and education

Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall was born in April 1934 in Hampstead, London. Her father, Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall, was a businessman, and her mother, Margaret Myfanwe Joseph, was a novelist from Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, who wrote under the pen name Vanne Morris-Goodall. The family moved to Bournemouth, where Goodall attended Uplands School, an independent school in nearby Poole. As a child, she received a stuffed toy chimpanzee named Jubilee from her father instead of a teddy bear. Goodall said this toy sparked her early love of animals, and Jubilee was still on her dresser in London as of 2000. Drawn to animals and Africa, she went to a friend's farm in the White Highlands of the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya in 1957. She worked as a secretary there, and she telephoned Louis Leakey, a Kenyan archaeologist and palaeontologist, to ask for a meeting about animals. Leakey believed that studying great apes could show how early hominids behaved, and he was looking for a chimpanzee researcher. He kept this idea to himself and offered her a secretary job instead. After his wife and co-researcher, the palaeoanthropologist Mary Leakey, approved, he sent Goodall to Olduvai Gorge in Tanganyika, now part of Tanzania, where he shared his plans.

In 1958, Leakey sent Goodall to London to study primate behaviour with Osman Hill and primate anatomy with John Napier. On 14 July 1960, she went to Gombe Stream National Park, becoming the first of what would be called the Trimates. Her mother came with her, because the chief warden, David Anstey, was concerned for their safety. Goodall credits her mother with encouraging her to pursue a career in primatology, a field dominated by men at that time. In 1962, Leakey arranged funding for her to study at the University of Cambridge, even though she had no degree. She was the eighth person allowed to study for a PhD there without a bachelor's degree. She attended Newnham College, Cambridge to study ethology, and her thesis, supervised by Robert Hinde, was completed in 1966. In 2006, the Open University of Tanzania gave her an honorary Doctor of Science degree. In 2019, she became an honorary fellow of Newnham College and Darwin College, Cambridge, and she was also awarded an honorary doctorate.

Career

Goodall began studying the social and family life of chimpanzees in the Kasakela chimpanzee community in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania, in 1960. She found that chimpanzees have personality, thoughts, and feelings such as joy and sorrow. She also saw them hug, kiss, pat each other on the back, and tickle. Her research challenged two long-held beliefs: that only humans could make and use tools, and that chimpanzees were vegetarians. She watched chimpanzees "fish" for termites with grass stalks and strip leaves from twigs to make them more useful. She also found that chimpanzees could be aggressive and violent, and that they hunt smaller monkeys such as colobus monkeys. She described the Gombe Chimpanzee War of 1974 to 1978 in her 1990 memoir, Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe. Unlike other researchers, she gave the animals names instead of numbers, which helped her become the only human ever accepted into chimpanzee society. Some of the chimpanzees she named include David Greybeard, Goliath, Flo, and Frodo.

In 1977 Goodall founded the Jane Goodall Institute, which supports her Gombe research and works to protect chimpanzees and their habitats. Its youth programme, Roots & Shoots, began in 1991 when 12 local teenagers met with Goodall in Dar es Salaam. In 1992 she founded the Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Centre in the Republic of Congo to care for orphaned chimpanzees. Goodall was also a vegetarian and became a vegan in 2021. She spoke out for animals and the environment, and in 2000 she helped found Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Her work at Gombe has also faced criticism. Some researchers believe that feeding chimpanzees at feeding stations changed their behaviour and may have increased the conflict Goodall observed. Goodall agreed that feeding had some effect, but she said it did not change the basic nature of chimpanzee conflict. In a 2017 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, she said she would not use feeding stations today.

Death

Goodall died in her sleep from cardiac arrest while staying at a friend's home in Beverly Hills, California, on 1 October 2025, at the age of 91. She had been on a speaking tour in the United States. Her death came 45 years to the day after her husband Bryceson's.

After her death, many well-known people shared tributes. These included Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex; the former US vice president Al Gore; the former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau; the comedian Ellen DeGeneres; the actor Leonardo DiCaprio; and António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations. In October 2025, Netflix released the first episode of Famous Last Words, in which Goodall was interviewed by Brad Falchuk.

Legacy

Further information: List of awards and honours received by Jane Goodall

Goodall received many honours for her environmental and humanitarian work, as well as for other things. In the 1995 New Year Honours, she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) "for services to zoology". In the 2003 Birthday Honours, she was promoted to Dame Commander of the same Order (DBE) "for services to the environment and conservation". The investiture to damehood was held at Buckingham Palace in 2004. In April 2002, Secretary-General Kofi Annan named Goodall a United Nations Messenger of Peace. Her other honours included the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, the French Legion of Honour, the Order of the Torch of Kilimanjaro of Tanzania, Japan's Kyoto Prize, the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science, the Gandhi-King Award for Nonviolence, and the Spanish Prince of Asturias Awards.

Goodall also received many tributes from local governments, schools, institutions and charities around the world. The Walt Disney Company honoured her with a plaque on the Tree of Life at Disney's Animal Kingdom theme park, along with a carving of David Greybeard, the first chimpanzee that approached her during her first year at Gombe. She was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. In 2010, Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds held a benefit concert at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., to commemorate "Gombe 50: a global celebration of Jane Goodall's pioneering chimpanzee research and inspiring vision for our future". Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2019, and in 2021 she received the Templeton Prize. On 31 December 2021, she guest edited the BBC Radio Four programme Today and chose Francis Collins to present Thought for the Day. In 2022, she received the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication for her long-term study of the social and family lives of wild chimpanzees. In April 2023, she was made an Officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau at a ceremony in The Hague, the Netherlands. In October 2024, she gave "A Speech for History" at UNESCO. In January 2025, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by US President Joe Biden. In December 2025, PETA gave her its "Person of the Year" award after her death, commemorating her "legacy of kindness."

Personal life

Goodall was married twice. On 28 March 1964 she married Baron Hugo van Lawick, a Dutch nobleman and wildlife photographer, at Chelsea Old Church in London, and during the marriage she was known as Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall. The couple had a son, Hugo, nicknamed "Grub," born in 1967. They divorced in 1974. The next year she married Derek Bryceson, a former member of Tanzania's parliament who was also the director of the country's national parks. Bryceson died of cancer in October 1980. Because of his position in the Tanzanian government, he was able to protect Goodall's research project and set up a ban on tourism at Gombe. Goodall said that her favourite animal was the dog, not the chimpanzees she studied. She had prosopagnosia, a condition that made it hard to recognise familiar faces, and she lived in Bournemouth, England.

Goodall supported the idea that undiscovered primates may still exist, including cryptids such as Sasquatch, Yeren and other types of Bigfoot. In 2012 she said she was fascinated by the idea and would love for them to exist. She was raised in a Christian congregationalist family and took night classes in Theosophy as a young woman. In 1977 she had a mystical experience at Notre Dame Cathedral, which led her to believe in a guiding power in the universe. She said she saw no contradiction between evolution and belief in God. In 2017 she wrote the foreword to a book by Ervin Laszlo, a philosopher of science who supports the quantum consciousness theory.

In popular culture

Stevie Nicks's song "Jane", written in 1990, celebrates Goodall's life and work. It is the last track on Nicks's 1994 Street Angel album. On 3 March 2022, in celebration of Women's History Month and International Women's Day, the Lego Group issued set number 40530, A Jane Goodall Tribute, which showed a Goodall minifigure and three chimpanzees in an African forest scene. In 2022 Mattel released a Barbie-themed Goodall doll made from recycled plastic, dressed in field clothes with binoculars and a notebook. Mattel said the doll was made to honour Goodall's "decades of dedication, ground-breaking research, and heroic achievements as a conservationist, animal behavior expert, and activist".

In 1987 Gary Larson published a Far Side cartoon showing two chimpanzees grooming. The Jane Goodall Institute called the cartoon an "atrocity" in a letter, but Goodall later found it amusing and named it her favourite depiction of herself in pop culture. Larson gave profits from a shirt featuring the cartoon to the institute. The Simpsons parodied Goodall in the 2001 episode "Simpson Safari", and she voiced herself in the 2019 episode "Gorillas on the Mast". She also voiced herself in an episode of The Wild Thornberrys, "The Trouble with Darwin". In February 2021 Apple TV+ ordered Jane, an educational children's show created by J. J. Johnson and co-produced by Sinking Ship Entertainment and the Jane Goodall Institute. Goodall appeared as herself in its final episode, which aired on 18 April 2025. In October 2025, after Goodall's death, it was announced that the filmmaker Richard Ladkani was working on a documentary about her life.

Works

Jane Goodall wrote many books for adults and for children. One early book, My Friends the Wild Chimpanzees, was published in 1969 by the National Geographic Society. Her book In the Shadow of Man was published by Houghton Mifflin and translated into 48 languages. Later books included Through a Window in 1990 and Reason for Hope in 1999.

Goodall also wrote books for young readers, such as The Chimpanzee Family Book and Chimpanzees I Love, which was published by Scholastic Press. She is also the subject of more than 40 films, including a 2000 PBS special called Jane Goodall: Reason for Hope.