Jane Goodall and the Chimpanzees of Gombe

Jane Goodall's career is often described as improbable, which is a polite way of saying that it did not follow the rules. Born in London in 1934, she was a child who preferred earthworms to dolls, and who famously hid in a henhouse for hours, as a small girl, simply to find out how a hen laid an egg. Her mother, who had been searching anxiously, chose to listen to her excited account rather than scold her. The episode is a fair introduction to a lifetime's habit of watching patiently until the world gave up its secrets. Her prospects, nevertheless, looked unremarkable. Her family could not afford university, so after school she took work as a secretary, a waitress and a film assistant. Her chance came in 1957, when a friend invited her to Kenya. There she met the palaeontologist Louis Leakey, who, impressed by her knowledge of animals, hired her as his assistant and eventually sent her to study wild chimpanzees on the shore of Lake Tanganyika. In the summer of 1960, aged twenty-six, she arrived at Gombe, in what is now Tanzania, with a notebook, a pair of binoculars and, because the authorities considered it improper for a young woman to camp alone in the forest, her mother as a companion. The early months produced little. The chimpanzees fled whenever she approached. Gradually, however, through simple persistence, she gained their tolerance, and then her first great discovery: she watched a male she called David Greybeard strip the leaves from a twig and use it to extract termites from a mound. Until then, the making and use of tools had been regarded as one of the defining features of humankind. Leakey is reported to have replied that science must now either redefine "tool", redefine "man", or accept chimpanzees as human. Goodall's methods attracted criticism. She had no first degree when she began; she gave her subjects names instead of numbers; and she wrote about their personalities, emotions and family relationships in terms that some scientists thought unscientific. Her reply was to continue observing carefully and to earn a doctorate at the University of Cambridge in 1965, one of very few people admitted without a bachelor's degree. In time, her view that animals have individual characters became widely accepted. The research at Gombe, which began in 1960, is regarded as the longest-running continuous study of wild chimpanzees. From the 1980s, however, Goodall turned increasingly from the forest to the lecture hall. Convinced that chimpanzees were losing their habitat, she travelled constantly, reportedly spending most of the year on the road, and founded programmes to encourage young people to look after animals, communities and the environment. For many, the most lasting image of her remains the quiet figure in the forest, waiting.