Jane Goodall, who shaped the world’s knowledge of chimpanzees, dies at 91

MGN

Jane Goodall, the renowned conservationist who shaped the world’s knowledge of chimpanzees, has died at the age of 91, the institute she founded announced Wednesday.

The Jane Goodall Institute said she died of natural causes while on a speaking tour in California.

“Dr. Goodall’s discoveries as an ethologist revolutionized science, and she was a tireless advocate for the protection and restoration of our natural world,” the organization said in a statement.

Goodall started documenting the lives and habits of chimpanzees in Tanzania as a young woman in the 1960s — but her passion for animals began long before that, in childhood. She told CBS News she would spend hours in a tree at her home in Bournemouth, England, with library books, dreaming of Africa. “I’ll go to Africa, live with animals, write books about them. That was it,” she said.

Born in London on April 3, 1934, Goodall grew up during an era with much different expectations for girls. She said she had “no intention of being a scientist, because girls didn’t do that sort of thing.”

She landed a job instead as a secretary with famed paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey after meeting him at a friend’s family farm in Kenya. He raised money to send Goodall to Gombe, Tanzania, for six months to study chimpanzees. At just 26 years old, alone in Africa, Goodall immersed herself in the chimpanzees’ world — of which little was known at the time — and made the groundbreaking observation that the primates used and made tools.

This discovery redefined the scientific world’s understanding of the relationship between humans and animals. Dr. Leakey said upon learning of the findings, “Now we must redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as humans!”

Goodall began studying at Cambridge University shortly afterwards and earned her Ph.D. in ethology in 1966. One year later, she gave birth to her only child, son Hugo, whom she had with wildlife photographer Baron Hugo van Lawick. The couple met when National Geographic sent van Lawick to Gombe, Tanzania, to photograph and document Goodall’s research with the chimpanzees.

Goodall said van Lawick’s film got people to believe her research findings, saying that when “his film started doing the rounds, showing the chimps using little twigs to fish for termites, they had to believe.”

The couple divorced after about a decade together and Goodall married Derek Bryceson, director of Tanzania’s national parks, in 1975. Bryceson died in 1980.

She established the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977, which continued research at Gombe and is a global leader in the effort to protect chimpanzees and their habitats. Its youth program, Roots & Shoots, empowers young people in more than 60 countries.

For the last four decades of her life. Goodall traveled the world speaking about climate change, the threats facing chimpanzees and how humans can help solve the problems they’ve created.

Goodall spoke with CBS News in 2020, as the world was grappling with the coronavirus pandemic, and discussed the importance of conservation and the environment.

“We need to realize we’re part of the environment, that we need the natural world. We depend on it. We can’t go on destroying,” Goodall said.

“We’ve got to somehow understand that we’re not separated from it; we are all intertwined. Harm nature, harm ourselves.”