(Valerie Jane Goodall [maiden name]; Jane van Lawick-Goodall [married name])
born on April 3, 1934 in London
British behavioral scientist and animal rights activist
90th birthday on April 3, 2024
Biography
“The age-old barrier that had come to separate man and chimpanzee in the course of evolution was overcome in that brief stretch of time: a reward beyond my wildest hopes ...” This was how Jane Goodall described the moving moment when David Greybeard, a gentle male chimpanzee, accepted fruit from her for the first time, and then squeezed her hand reassuringly. The encounter was the result of months and years of perseverance in the soaking wet rainforest and on the steep slopes above the Gombe Stream. It was there, on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, that Jane Goodall had begun the sensational observations in 1960 at the age of 26 that led to a redefinition of the boundary between humans and animals.
She proved that chimpanzees are able to produce and use tools in a targeted manner (e.g. twigs stripped of leaves to “fish” for termites) and that they develop lifelong family bonds, communicate using a sophisticated system of calls, facial expressions and touch, care for and raise their offspring over many years, supplement their diet of plants and small animals with occasional meat rations (preferably the young of other primate species, which they hunt together), and wage wars of conquest that are sometimes long and cruel.
At 23, the young Englishwoman had fulfilled her childhood dream - Africa. She first worked as an assistant to the well-known paleontologist Louis Leakey at the National Museum in Nairobi and was then sent to Tanzania to observe chimpanzees in the wild, despite her lack of scientific training. This made her the first of what would later become a famous trio of female researchers (Goodall, Dian Fossey and Birute Galdikas), from whose primate studies Leakey hoped to gain insights into the way of life of early hominids.
In 1962, she was visited by Hugo van Lawick, a talented animal filmmaker and photographer whose photographs for National Geographic soon made her and her work with chimpanzees world-famous.
Goodall and Lawick married in 1964. The following year Jane Goodall was able to submit her dissertation at Cambridge, although she had never completed a bachelor’s degree, and in 1967 her son Hugo was born.
Over the years, Goodall's activities shifted from field research to environmental and developmental causes. In 1977, she founded the Jane Goodall Institute for Wildlife Research, Education and Conservation, which is now represented in 23 countries. Kofi Annan appointed her as a United Nations Messenger of Peace in 2002.
(Text from 2009; translated with DeepL.com; edited by Ramona Fararo, 2024.)
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