What to know about the life and legacy of Jane Goodall

The famous primatologist Jane Goodall was renowned for her revolutionary work with chimpanzees but devoted her life to helping all wild animals – a passion that lasted until his death this week during an American tour.

She has spent decades to promote humanitarian causes and the need to protect the natural world and tried to balance the dark realities of the climate crisis with hope for the future, admirers said.

These messages of hope “mobilized a global movement to protect the planet,” said former president Joe Biden, who awarded Goodall the presidential medal of freedom just before leaving his duties.

Here are some things to know about the life and inheritance of Goodall:

Despite Goodall’s lasting passion to observe wild animals in Africa, she had no university diploma when she arrived there in 1957, starting as assistant secretary in a Nairobi Natural History Museum.

The famous anthropologist and paleontologist Louis Leakey gave him the work and later invited her to seek fossils with him and his wife in the Gorges of Olduvai. After seeing her on the grain and determination, Leakey asked if she would be interested in studying chimpanzees in what is now Tanzania.

She told the Associated Press in 1997 that he chose it “because he wanted an open mind”.

It was not until 1966 that she obtained a doctorate. In ethology – becoming one of the few people admitted to the University of Cambridge as a doctorate. candidate without university degree.

While he was studying chimpanzees in Tanzania for the first time in the early 1960s, Goodall did not spend his days simply observing animals from afar and giving them figures like other scientists.

She immersed herself in all aspects of their lives, nourishing them and giving them names and forming what can only be described as personal relationships with them. The approach was criticized by certain scientists who saw it as an alarming lack of scientific detachment.

Goodall has documented chimpanzees in a wide range of widely raw activities at the time as exclusive to humans, in particular by showing their ruthlessly violent side during what it described as a “war”.

She described having seen a group tracking down systematically and killing members of a smaller group in four years. The war only ended after each member of the small group was dead.

“It was a shock to see that they could show such brutal behavior,” she said in 2003. “It made them look like us even more than us, I thought before.”

In another case, she recalled a dominant chimpanzee brushing a younger chimpanzee to obtain fruit. When the second chimpanzee shouted, his big brother intervened to save him. And then when these two chimpanzees started to shout, a woman with two trees intervened.

As Goodall could crawl, she had a fascination for animals. When she bought her first book at the age of 10 – “Tarzan of the Apes” by Edgar Rice Burroughs – her vision of the future began to solidify. She planned to go to Africa and live with wild animals.

But his dreams did not involve becoming a scientist. She told the Associated Press in 2020 that she planned to be a naturalist and write books on animals. But this vision has changed by learning more.

“I always wanted to help animals all my life. And then of course, it led to “if you want to save wild animals, you have to work with the local population, find ways for them to live without harming the environment and worry about the children and the future they could have if we continue as usual,” she said.

Goodall said that watching a disturbing film in 1986 on the experiences of laboratory animals had pushed him to plead – a vocation that lasted until his death.

“I knew I had to do something,” she said later. “It was recovery time.”

She was still traveling almost 300 days a year by giving lectures to a crowded audience and was in the middle of an American tour when she died of natural causes in California, said Jane Goodall Institute. On Wednesday, she was to meet students and teachers to launch an effort to plant trees in burning areas of forest fires in the Los Angeles region.

When she could not travel during the Covid-19 pandemic, she started podcasting from her childhood home in England. She spoke with guests such as the American senator Cory Booker, the author Margaret Atwood and the marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson on dozens of episodes of the “Jane Goodall Hopecast”.

Admirers said that Goodall has inspired generations of young people, especially women and girls.

Jeffrey Flocken, an international world officer for animals, recalled how goodall spent two hours telling stories of young girls on “her adventures with animals and challenges to be a young biological woman pioneer in the field when conservation was still an emerging profession”.

“Chimpanzees, pangolins, elephants and even more. Jane cared passionately about all animals. And she was able to use this passion to inspire others – children in particular,” said Flocken.

Primatologist at St. Andrews University, Catherine Hobaiter, who studies Chimpanzee’s communication, said her vision of science had been transformed when she was a young researcher and heard Goodall for the first time.

“It was the first time … that I learned that it was good to feel something,” said Hobaiter.

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The AP scientific writer Christina Larson contributed to this story.