Jane Goodall broke a scientific taboo by giving chimpanzees names
In the early 1960s, researchers gave study animals numbers to avoid getting attached. Jane Goodall called hers David Greybeard, Goliath, Flo and Fifi, and wrote about their childhoods, moods and personalities. Critics accused her of anthropomorphism, the cardinal sin of animal behaviour science. Her observations went on to change what counts as uniquely human.
Her route to Gombe was unusual. Goodall, born in London in 1934, had loved a toy chimpanzee called Jubilee since childhood, a gift from her father that her mother's friends feared would give her nightmares. In 1957 she was working as a secretary in Kenya when she phoned Louis Leakey simply to talk about animals. He was quietly searching for someone to study living apes, hoping they might shed light on early human ancestors, and he hired her. On 14 July 1960 she arrived at Gombe Stream in what is now Tanzania, with her mother along because the chief warden worried about their safety.
The first chimp to warm to her was David Greybeard, a male with a grey chin. Her most famous early sighting came at a termite mound, where she watched one male poke grass stems into a termite mound and draw them out coated with insects. Chimps also stripped leaves off twigs to make better probes, a crude form of toolmaking. Leakey's verdict was that either the definitions of man and tool had to change, or chimpanzees would have to count as human. Gombe also overturned the notion that chimps were vegetarian: hunting parties cornered colobus monkeys in trees and shared the meat, taking up to a third of the park's colobus every year.
Without a first degree, she was admitted to Cambridge for a doctorate, only the eighth person allowed to do so, and completed her thesis on the first five years at Gombe in 1966 under Robert Hinde. She also recorded hugs, kisses, back pats and tickling, and bonds that could last a chimpanzee lifetime of over 50 years, along with a darker side, including a war between chimp groups from 1974 to 1978.
In 1977 she founded the Jane Goodall Institute. Its youth programme, Roots and Shoots, started in 1991 when 12 teenagers gathered on her back porch in Dar es Salaam and had grown to more than 10,000 groups by 2010. She wrote 32 books, 15 for children, and became a dame in 2003. She died in October 2025.
Source: Jane Goodall
