In 1960, a twenty-six-year-old woman with no university degree walked into the Gombe Stream forest in Tanzania and started watching chimpanzees. The scientific establishment expected her to fail. She had no formal training. She had no methodology. She had a pair of binoculars, a notebook, and a mother who came along because the British authorities would not allow a young woman to live alone in the jungle. Within months, she made two discoveries that shattered assumptions held by every primatologist alive. She observed chimpanzees making tools. She observed them eating meat. Both observations contradicted the established scientific consensus that tool use was uniquely human and that chimpanzees were vegetarians.

She Named the Chimps and the Scientists Were Furious

Goodall's supervisor at Cambridge, where she eventually earned her PhD, told her she had done everything wrong. She had given the chimpanzees names instead of numbers. She had described their emotional states instead of limiting herself to observable behaviors. She had committed the cardinal sin of ethology: anthropomorphism. Primatologists at Cambridge University have since acknowledged that Goodall's approach, while unconventional, produced insights that rigidly objective methods had missed. By building individual relationships with the chimpanzees, she was able to observe behaviors that no researcher using standard methods had ever documented. She watched David Greybeard strip leaves from a twig to fish for termites. She watched Flo raise her children with a tenderness that looked, to Goodall, indistinguishable from love. The naming controversy now seems absurd. But in 1960, the idea that animals had personalities, emotions, and individual identities was considered sentimental nonsense by mainstream science. Goodall did not argue the point theoretically. She simply produced evidence that made the argument impossible to ignore.

She Left the Forest to Save It

By the 1980s, Goodall faced a realization that changed the direction of her life. The forests around Gombe were disappearing. The chimpanzee population she had studied for twenty years was shrinking. The work she had devoted her life to was becoming irrelevant because the subjects of her research were running out of places to live. Environmental researchers at the Jane Goodall Institute have documented that wild chimpanzee populations have declined by over fifty percent since Goodall began her research. She responded by becoming an activist. She travels over three hundred days a year. She founded the Roots and Shoots program, which operates in over sixty countries. She speaks to audiences of thousands with the same patience she used watching a single chimpanzee strip leaves from a twig. She is ninety years old. She has spent sixty of those years making the case that the boundary between humans and other animals is thinner than we want to believe. She sat in a forest and watched, and what she saw was us.