Jane Goodall Timeline

Jane Goodall 12

1934 Jane Goodall born in Hampstead, London Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall was born on 3 April 1934 in Hampstead, London, to Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall, a businessman, and Margaret Myfanwe Joseph, a novelist. As a child she was given a stuffed toy chimpanzee named Jubilee, which sparked a lifelong fascination with animals. She grew up dreaming of going to Africa to live among wild animals -- a dream that seemed impossible for a young woman without money or university education.
1957 Travels to Kenya -- meets Louis Leakey In 1957, Goodall travelled to Kenya at the invitation of a school friend. There she met the palaeontologist Louis Leakey, who hired her as his secretary at the Coryndon Museum in Nairobi. Leakey recognised her passion and patience and proposed that she undertake a long-term study of wild chimpanzees -- despite her lack of any scientific degree. He believed her fresh perspective, uncontaminated by academic theory, would be an advantage.
1960 – 1961 Tool use and meat eating -- revolutionary discoveries In her first year at Gombe, Goodall made two observations that overturned scientific orthodoxy: she watched a chimpanzee she named David Greybeard fashion a stick to extract termites from a mound, proving that humans were not the only tool-making species; and she observed chimpanzees hunting and eating meat, disproving the assumption that they were vegetarians. When she reported these findings to Leakey, he famously replied: 'Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.'
1960 Arrives at Gombe Stream -- July 1960 On 14 July 1960, the 26-year-old Goodall arrived at the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania, accompanied by her mother. For months the chimpanzees fled from her. She persisted, observing from a distance with binoculars, slowly earning the trust of the community she would study for the next sixty years.
1962 – 1966 Cambridge PhD -- without an undergraduate degree Leakey arranged for Goodall to pursue a PhD at Cambridge University despite her lack of an undergraduate degree -- only the eighth person in Cambridge history to be admitted under such circumstances. Her thesis, Behaviour of Free-Living Chimpanzees (1966), established the scientific foundation for her work. At Cambridge, she was criticised for giving her chimpanzee subjects names rather than numbers and for attributing emotions and personalities to them -- practices that later became standard in ethology.
1964 – 1974 Marriage to Hugo van Lawick and National Geographic In 1964, Goodall married Dutch wildlife photographer Hugo van Lawick, whose photographs and films for National Geographic brought her work to a global audience. Their son Hugo Eric Louis 'Grub' was born in 1967 and grew up at Gombe. National Geographic's 1963 cover story 'My Life Among the Wild Chimpanzees' made Goodall famous worldwide. The couple divorced in 1974.
1975 – 1980 The dark side of chimpanzees -- warfare and cannibalism In the mid-1970s, Goodall observed a four-year war between two chimpanzee communities at Gombe, during which members of one group systematically hunted and killed members of another. She also documented cases of infanticide and cannibalism. These discoveries shattered romantic notions of chimpanzees as peaceful creatures and revealed a capacity for organised violence with unsettling parallels to human behaviour.
1977 Founds the Jane Goodall Institute In 1977, Goodall founded the Jane Goodall Institute to support her research at Gombe and to promote conservation of chimpanzees and their habitats worldwide. The institute grew into a major international organisation working across Africa and beyond, combining scientific research with community-based conservation programmes.
1986 – 2025 From researcher to global activist In 1986, Goodall attended a conference that confronted her with the scale of deforestation, habitat destruction and illegal trafficking threatening chimpanzee survival across Africa. She made a conscious decision to shift from researcher to activist, later saying she 'went into the forest to study chimpanzees and came out to save them.' For the remaining four decades of her life, she travelled the world relentlessly -- sometimes 300 days a year -- giving lectures, meeting world leaders, and advocating for conservation.
1991 – 2025 Roots and Shoots -- empowering young people In 1991, Goodall founded Roots and Shoots, a global youth programme encouraging children and young people to take action for animals, the environment and their communities. The programme grew to operate in over 65 countries with hundreds of thousands of participants, reflecting Goodall's conviction that meaningful change would come from young people.
2002 – 2025 UN Messenger of Peace and global honours In 2002, Goodall was appointed a United Nations Messenger of Peace. She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (2004), received the Templeton Prize (2021), the French Legion of Honour, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2025). She served on the board of the Nonhuman Rights Project and continued public speaking until the final weeks of her life.
2025 Jane Goodall dies in Beverly Hills Jane Goodall died in her sleep on 1 October 2025 in Beverly Hills, California, while on a speaking tour in the United States. She was 91. Her cause of death was cardiopulmonary arrest. The Jane Goodall Institute said: 'Today is a profoundly sad day for the planet. But Jane's light continues in all of us.' She had recently spoken at New York Climate Week 2025, still carrying Jubilee, the toy chimpanzee she had been given as a child.