The Magnificent Jane Goodall

Curiosity, dedication, advocacy

Greetings, friends!

This Magnificent Monday offers an admiring nod to the British primatologist and conservationist Jane Goodall. Dame Jane will turn 90 on April 3, 2024. She has spent virtually all those years driven by a mission to better understand animals and protect our natural world.

In interviews, Dame Jane often says she popped from her mother's womb with a passion for animals. From very early in her life, she knew she wanted to go to Africa, spend time with animals, and write books about them. Which is what, of course, she did.

What I love about Goodall is that she didn't wait for permission. She didn't wait to have the right credentials. She did work hard, though, and found great support in her mother and in palaeoanthropologist Louis Leakey, who understood early that Goodall and others (including Dian Fossey) would play important roles in continuing his work to find connections between animals and human beings.

In an interview with Ira Flatow of NPR's "Science Friday," Goodall describes being a child transfixed by her own curiosity. On a trip to the country, this city girl went off to the hen house and … stayed a while.

"I hid for five hours because I was collecting the eggs, and there was the egg,” she says. “Where was the hole big enough for the egg to come out? Nobody told me, so I hid. And I watched it. And it was my first wonderful experiment."

In 1960, Goodall broke ground during her observation of chimpanzees at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. There, she watched a chimp she named David Greybeard and another peel the leaves off sticks and use the sticks to pull termites from a hole and eat them.

Until then, the use of tools was thought to be a characteristic that distinguished humans from animals. When Goodall sent Leakey a telegram reporting her findings, Leakey wrote back, “Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man’ or accept chimpanzees as human.”

Here's a link to a fun interview Goodall did with Jimmy Kimmel in 2023.
And here’s a link to the Jane Goodall Institute website.

Have a curiosity-filled week, friends.

There’s wise, older Jane with Jimmy Kimmel in front of a photo of young Jane with David Greybeard.