DAY IN HISTORY-JULY 14, 1960

Jane Goodall Arrives in Tanzania

Begins historic study of chimpanzees July 14

Jane Goodall speaks at Mizzou Arena, Sept. 17, 2014. Photo by Mark Schierbecker, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Born in 1934 in England, Jane Goodall grew up with a love for animals. When she read about Tarzan and Dr. Doolittle as a young girl, she dreamed of working with wild animals in Africa.

Her dream came true thanks to Dr. Louis Leakey, a renowned paleoanthropologist. At age 23, Goodall journeyed to Nairobi, Kenya to visit a friend. While there, she took a job at a local natural history museum, working for Dr. Leakey. Despite having no college degree, Goodall impressed Leakey with her passion for learning about animals. He agreed to send her to study wild chimpanzees at the Gombe Stream Game Reserve (today a National Park) in Tanzania. Leaky wanted to see if he could learn about early humans from chimps, man’s closest living relatives. He thought Goodall’s lack of formal education would allow her to be unbound by traditional thinking about the animals.

Goodall first went back to England to study the behavior of primates at the London Zoo’s film library. When Dr. Leakey secured funding for her expedition, off Goodall went, arriving in Tanzania on July 14, 1960. At the start, she was ill, probably from malaria, delaying her work. Then she had to trek for miles before even spotting a chimpanzee.

At last, an older chimp allowed Goodall to watch him. Against the common convention of numbering wild animals, Goodall instead decided to name him “David Greybeard.” She saw Greybeard use tools, an observational breakthrough in chimp behavior. With Greybeard’s acceptance of Goodall’s presence, she was able to extend her observations to other chimpanzees.

This was the start of more than six decades of primate research, during which time Goodall became renowned as the world’s preeminent expert in chimp behavior. Always willing to break with tradition, Goodall named chimps rather than number them and advanced the notion that chimps had distinct personalities and expressed emotions. Her first book, My Friends, the Wild Chimpanzees, published by the National Geographic Society, was written for the general public instead of academicians and scientists, much to their dismay.

According to the National Geographic Society:

During the years she studied at Gombe Stream National Park, she made three observations that challenged conventional scientific ideas: (1) chimps are omnivores, not herbivores and even hunt for meat; (2) chimps use tools; and (3) chimps make their tools (a trait previously used to define humans). Beyond the significance of her discoveries, it was Jane’s high standards for methods and ethics in behavioral studies that may have had the greatest impact in the scientific community.

More than twenty years after Jane Goodall began her primate research, she shifted gears to become a conservationist and animal activist. She worked to preserve forests and helped set up refuges for chimpanzees. In 1977, she established the Jane Goodall Institute to put local communities at the heart of conservation.

Before Goodall died in 2025 at age 91, she traveled the globe advocating for wildlife conservation and the protection of critical habitats, such as reforestation in the Gombe area.

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