How Jane Goodall Changed How We Study Animals

In October 1960, a 26-year-old Jane Goodall was walking through a rocky outcrop in what is now Tanzania’s Gombe National Park when she saw movement in the long grasses ahead. Peering through her binoculars, Goodall watched as an older male chimpanzee with distinctive silver facial hair sat on an earthen mound. Again and again, the animal pushed a stem of grass into a hole in the mound, withdrew the stem and picked something off it with his mouth. When he left, Goodall tried mimicking the same motion and saw termites clinging to the stem.

Goodall later observed a chimpanzee picking a small leafy twig and removing its leaves before using it to fish for termites. In that moment, she knew she had seen not only evidence of chimp tool use but also the beginnings of tool making—two behaviors previously thought to be exclusively human.

“My observations at Gombe challenged human uniqueness,” Goodall later wrote in her memoir Reason For Hope. “And whenever that happens there is always a violent scientific and theological uproar.”

Goodall had no college degree or scientific training when she traveled from her native England to Africa several years earlier. Instead, she brought a lifelong love of animals and the desire to observe lions, elephants, giraffes, monkeys and other creatures in their native habitat.

In Nairobi, Kenya, she met celebrated paleoanthropologist Dr. Louis Leakey, who hired her as his personal secretary at the local natural history museum.

Known for his pioneering research into human evolution at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, Leakey spoke with Goodall about his interest in chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans, the closest living relatives of humans. Studies of ape behavior had begun early in the 20th century, but until then research had mainly been done on chimpanzees in captivity.

“In those days, work in the natural habitat was frowned upon as unscientific: Only laboratory approaches provided the controls required for conclusive science,” the Dutch-American primatologist Frans de Waal wrote in Nature in 2011 of the early years of chimpanzee research.

Leakey wanted to send someone to study chimpanzees in the wild to better understand how humans’ Stone Age ancestors may have behaved. He saw Goodall’s lack of formal training as an advantage, as she would presumably be more open-minded and less bound to traditional scientific wisdom about primate behavior.

In June 1960, Goodall established a camp at Gombe Stream on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania to begin the first long-term study of wild chimpanzees. Initially, she thought the study might last three years, she told the New York Times in 2010 in an interview to commemorate the 50th anniversary of her arrival in Gombe. “The more I learned about chimpanzees, the more I realized there was more to learn—until I couldn’t stop.”

At first, the chimps ran away from Goodall. “I was an intruder, and a strange one at that,” she recalled in Reason For Hope. But gradually, as she earned their trust, she began observing them at close range and making detailed notes about their behavior. Departing from established scientific practice, Goodall gave the chimpanzees names instead of numbers—the older male chimp fishing for termites was David Greybeard—and noted aspects of their personalities and the emotions they displayed.

Aside from short absences, Goodall remained in Gombe until 1975, and her research upended the existing view that humans were the only species capable of tool use, emotions and complex social structures. As Leakey famously wrote when Goodall telegrammed the news of David Greybeard’s tool use: “Now we must redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human.”

Goodall’s breakthroughs didn’t stop there. While chimpanzees were previously believed to be herbivores, she observed them hunting and eating bush pigs, colobus monkeys and other small mammals. She also witnessed strong familial bonds among the animals, including between mothers and their infants and between siblings. Goodall’s observations also revealed the darker side of chimp society, including a prolonged conflict during which one community split into two groups that fought for years, sometimes to the death.

“Another claim of human uniqueness was abandoned when it was discovered that we are not the only primates to kill our own kind,” de Waal wrote in Nature. “Reports of lethal fighting between chimpanzee communities over territory profoundly affected the post-war debate about the origins of human aggression.”

Goodall’s research not only reshaped primatology, it also inspired new approaches to studying animal behavior more broadly. She set a new standard for field research, including painstaking observation, detailed note-keeping and an insistence on seeing animals as individuals worthy of respect and empathy.

After witnessing deforestation in Africa and worldwide, Goodall turned increasingly to conservation and activism in the 1990s. She continues to advocate for the protection of chimpanzees and their habitats through the Jane Goodall Institute, founded in 1977.

“I think it’s now generally accepted that we are not the only beings on the planet with personalities, minds and emotions,” Goodall said in 2021. “That we are part of and not separated from the rest of the animal kingdom.”