Dr. Jane Goodall, the famed chimpanzee researcher and animal advocate, has died, her institute said Wednesday. She was 91.
Goodall died of natural causes in California, where she was on a speaking tour, the Jane Goodall Institute announced.
“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 statement said.
Goodall and her groundbreaking work with primates were the subject of dozens of news reports and documentaries, including the Emmy-winning “Jane” in 2017, which National Geographic put together from hours of footage discovered years later in its archive.
Goodall discovered in the 1960s that chimpanzees used tools, which upended her field of study and popularized the notion that the animals were highly intelligent, even in the wild. Very little was known about chimpanzees’ behavior before Goodall began her field study, but “the more I learned, the more I realized how like us they were” – including their capacity for brutality.
In 1977, she founded the Jane Goodall Institute to advance primatology research. Goodall’s work also extended to humanitarian causes in the African countries where she conducted her work.
Goodall was born in London in 1934 and grew up with a boundless curiosity about the natural world. From her earliest years she carried notebooks, sketching animals and jotting observations, as if preparing for the career she did not yet know awaited. Lacking the funds to continue into higher education, she worked as a secretary and waitress, saving money for a long-imagined trip to Africa.
That journey took her to Kenya in 1957, and a chance meeting with the celebrated anthropologist Louis Leakey, who saw in her not only passion but patience, the two qualities he considered essential for field science.
Leakey arranged for her to begin a study of wild chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream reserve in Tanganyika (modern Tanzania). With no formal scientific training, Goodall relied on sharp instincts and endless hours of careful watching.
Her decision to name the chimps, describe their personalities and record behaviors others might have dismissed as anecdote made her work controversial at first. She was first to document chimpanzees using tools, challenging long-held assumptions about the uniqueness of human culture.
Goodall’s observations grew into decades of research, transforming primatology and influencing the broader fields of anthropology and psychology. Over time she moved from scientist in the forest to global advocate.
Goodall earned some of the world’s highest honors for her work as a scientist, naturalist and humanitarian. She was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1995 and the United Nations appointed her Messenger of Peace in 2002; other honors include the Kyoto Prize, the French Legion of Honour, the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science, the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication and the Presidential Medal of Freedom under Joe Biden, which she received in January this year.
Goodall continued to travel, lecture and study until her death. She was twice married, first to Dutch wildlife photographer Baron Hugo van Lawick with whom she had son Hugo Eric Louis; the couple divorced in 1974. The following year she married Derek Bryceson, a Tanzanian parliament member and national parks director; he died of cancer in 1980.
