Jane Goodall was born April 3, 1934 in London England. In 1939,
her family moved to France. After Hitler began invading Europe, her family
moved to England and eventually settled in Barnemouth, living with Jane's
maternal grandmother at the family home known as the Birches. This is where
Jane spent the rest of her childhood and adolescence.
After graduating from high school, Jane went to secretarial school and then had a series of jobs at Oxford University and for a film studio that made documentary films. Jane had wanted to go to Africa since she was a child, so when an old friend from school invited Jane to visit her in Kenya, Jane eagerly accepted. She sailed from London to Africa on the passenger liner The Kenya Castle. Two months after arriving there she met Louis Leakey, who gave her a job. Nine months after being in Africa, she saved enough to have her mother come and visit. While her mother was visiting, Dr. Leakey encouraged Jane to take up a study of a group of wild chimpanzees. She needed a companion to help with the study so her mother decided to go with her.
There were a series of fights which delayed the start of the study, but on July 16, 1960 Jane Goodall and her mother finally made the boat trip to Gombe. With two scouts from the game reserve and their cook Dominic, the work began, which was to span 30 years. The work that Jane has been doing all these years in Tanzania is known as Ethology, the study of animal behavior. Ethology was a relatively new field when Jane Goodall began in 1960; Dr. Leakey encouraged her to study wild chimpanzees in particular because of their close genetic link to human beings. (The DNA of chimpanzees differs from Homo sapiens by only just over 1 percent.) Dr. Leakey felt it would take years, rather than months, to accumulate enough data to draw accurate conclusions about animal behavior.
Over the last thirty years, Jane Goodall's story has had all the ingredients of a great adventure from the early days when she and her mother suffered malaria to her first sighting of a chimp using a tool. It spanned a polio epidemic among the chimps to a war between the chimp tribes, from her own marriage and the birth of her son to her divorce and remarriage, from world wide recognition of her Research Center at Gombe to the kidnapping of student researchers. But the most fascinating tale of all has been the chronology of a community of chimpanzees that has had all the drama and tenderness of human story.
Jane Goodall demonstrated that with imagination and determination one can break free to live a life of adventure and accomplishment. Her research had an effect on the world and the animals in it. In the last ten years, she has had a significant impact on how zoos and laboratories treat animals, and the books she has published have helped to educate both children and adults.
Brunet, Maria J. Jane Goodall: Research on a Biography 1991.
Goodall, Jane, Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe. Boston : Houghton Mifflin,1990.
Montgomery, Sy. Walking with the Great Apes : Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Birut Galdikas / Sy Montgomery. Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co., 1991.
Written by: Students in an Introduction to Anthropology Class, Minnesota State University, Mankato, Minnesota 2002