Age, Biography, and Wiki
Jane Goodall, born on April 3, 1934, is a British researcher who has dedicated her life to understanding chimpanzees and advocating for their welfare. She is considered the world's top expert on chimpanzees, thanks to her 60-year study of wild chimpanzees, which began in Tanzania in 1960. Her work has been pivotal in challenging traditional scientific beliefs about animal behavior and has inspired a global movement in conservation.
| Occupation | Anthropologist |
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| Date of Birth | 3 April 1934 |
| Age | 91 Years |
| Birth Place | London, England |
| Horoscope | Aries |
| Country | England |
Height, Weight & Measurements
Jane Goodall's specific height and weight measurements are not widely documented, but her stature and energy are often described as being as remarkable as her contributions to science.
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Dating & Relationship Status
Jane Goodall has been married twice. Her first marriage was to Hugo van Lawick, a wildlife filmmaker, with whom she had a son, Hugo Eric Louis van Lawick, born in 1967. They divorced in 1974. In 1975, she married Derek Bryceson, a Tanzanian politician, until his death in 1980.
As a child, Goodall's father gave her a stuffed toy chimpanzee named Jubilee as an alternative to a teddy bear. Goodall has said her fondness for it sparked her early love of animals, commenting, "My mother's friends were horrified by this toy, thinking it would frighten me and give me nightmares." Jubilee still sits on Goodall's dresser in London.
Goodall had always been drawn to animals and Africa, which brought her to the farm of a friend in the Kenya highlands in 1957. From there, she obtained work as a secretary, and acting on her friend's advice, she telephoned Louis Leakey, the Kenyan archaeologist and palaeontologist, with no other thought than to make an appointment to discuss animals. Leakey, believing that the study of existing great apes could provide indications of the behaviour of early hominids, was looking for a chimpanzee researcher, though he kept the idea to himself. Instead, he proposed that Goodall work for him as a secretary. After obtaining approval from his co-researcher and wife, British paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey, Louis sent Goodall to Olduvai Gorge in Tanganyika (now part of Tanzania), where he laid out his plans.
In 1958, Leakey sent Goodall to London to study primate behaviour with Osman Hill and primate anatomy with John Napier. Leakey raised funds, and on 14 July 1960, Goodall went to Gombe Stream National Park, becoming the first of what would come to be called The Trimates. She was accompanied by her mother, whose presence was necessary to satisfy the requirements of David Anstey, chief warden, who was concerned for their safety. Goodall credits her mother with encouraging her to pursue a career in primatology, a male-dominated field at the time. Goodall has said that women were not accepted in the field when she started her research in the late 1950s. As of 2019, the field of primatology is made up almost evenly of men and women, in part thanks to the trailblazing of Goodall and her encouragement of young women to join the field.
| Parents | |
| Husband | Baron Hugo van Lawick (m. 28 March 1964-1974) Derek Bryceson (m. 1975-1980) |
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Net Worth and Salary
As of 2025, Jane Goodall's net worth is estimated to be between $5 million and $15 million, depending on the source. Her income comes from book royalties, speaking engagements, and collaborations with various organizations, including her role as a UN Messenger of Peace.
Career, Business, and Investments
- Research and Advocacy: Goodall's career is marked by her pioneering research on chimpanzees, which has led to significant advancements in understanding animal behavior and conservation.
- Jane Goodall Institute: Founded in 1977, the institute is a global organization focused on wildlife conservation and environmental protection.
- Media and Publishing: Goodall has authored numerous books and has been featured in several documentaries and films, further increasing her influence and financial standing.
- Sustainable Initiatives: Recently, she collaborated with Brilliant Earth to launch a sustainable jewelry line, highlighting her commitment to environmental causes.
She is the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and the Roots & Shoots programme and has worked extensively on conservation and animal welfare issues. As of 2022, she is on the board of the Nonhuman Rights Project. In April 2002, she was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace. Goodall is an honorary member of the World Future Council.
Leakey arranged funding, and in 1962 he sent Goodall, who had no degree, to the University of Cambridge. She was the eighth person to be allowed to study for a PhD at Cambridge without first having obtained a bachelor's degree. She attended Newnham College, Cambridge, where she received her Bachelor of Arts degree in natural sciences by 1964. Later that year, she enrolled at the newly established Darwin College, Cambridge, to pursue a Doctor of Philosophy degree in ethology. Her thesis was completed in 1966 under the supervision of Robert Hinde on the Behaviour of free-living chimpanzees, detailing her first five years of study at the Gombe Reserve.
In 2018 and 2020, Goodall partnered with friend and CEO Michael Cammarata on two natural product lines from Schmidt's Naturals and Neptune Wellness Solutions. Five percent of every sale benefited the Jane Goodall Institute.
Goodall has married twice. On 28 March 1964, she married a Dutch nobleman, wildlife photographer Baron Hugo van Lawick, at Chelsea Old Church, London, and became known during their marriage as Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall. The couple had a son, Hugo Eric Louis (born 1967); they divorced in 1974. The following year, she married Derek Bryceson, a member of Tanzania's parliament and the director of that country's national parks. Bryceson died of cancer in October 1980. Owing to his position in the Tanzanian government as head of the country's national park system, Bryceson could protect Goodall's research project and implement an embargo on tourism at Gombe.
Goodall has received many tributes, honours, and awards from local governments, schools, institutions, and charities around the world. Goodall is honoured by The Walt Disney Company with a plaque on the Tree of Life at Disney's Animal Kingdom theme park, alongside a carving of her beloved David Greybeard, the original chimpanzee that approached Goodall during her first year at Gombe. She is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
* 2001 Beyond Innocence: An Autobiography in Letters, the later years (edited by Dale Peterson). New York: Houghton Mifflin Company ISBN 0-618-12520-5
Social Network
Jane Goodall is active on social media platforms, including Instagram, where her work and initiatives are frequently highlighted through the Jane Goodall Institute's account (@janegoodallinst).
Goodall studied chimpanzee social and family life beginning with the Kasakela chimpanzee community in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania, in 1960. She found that "it isn't only human beings who have personality, who are capable of rational thought [and] emotions like joy and sorrow." She also observed behaviours such as hugs, kisses, pats on the back, and even tickling, what we consider "human" actions. Goodall insists that these gestures are evidence of "the close, supportive, affectionate bonds that develop between family members and other individuals within a community, which can persist throughout a life span of more than 50 years."
Goodall also observed the tendency for aggression and violence within chimpanzee troops. Goodall observed dominant females deliberately killing the young of other females in the troop to maintain their dominance, sometimes going as far as cannibalism. She says of this revelation, "During the first ten years of the study I had believed [...] that the Gombe chimpanzees were, for the most part, rather nicer than human beings. [...] Then suddenly we found that chimpanzees could be brutal—that they, like us, had a darker side to their nature." She described the 1974–1978 Gombe Chimpanzee War in her 1990 memoir, Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe. Her findings revolutionised contemporary knowledge of chimpanzee behaviour and were further evidence of the social similarities between humans and chimpanzees.
In 2008, Goodall gave a lecture entitled "Reason for Hope" at the University of San Diego's Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice, and in the same year demanded the European Union end the use of medical research on animals and ensure more funding for alternative methods of medical research. She controversially described Edinburgh Zoo's new primate enclosure as a "wonderful facility" where monkeys "are probably better off [than those] living in the wild in an area like Budongo, where one in six gets caught in a wire snare, and countries like Congo, where chimpanzees, monkeys and gorillas are shot for food commercially." This was in conflict with Advocates for Animals' position on captive animals. In June that year, she resigned the presidency of the organisation which she had held since 1998, citing her busy schedule and explaining, "I just don't have time for them." Goodall is a patron of the population concern charity Population Matters and as of 2017 is an ambassador for Disneynature.
Goodall is known to support the possibility that undiscovered species of primates may still exist today, including cryptids such as Sasquatch, Yeren and other types of Bigfoot. She has talked about this possibility in various interviews and debates. In 2012, when the Huffington Post asked her about it, Goodall replied: "I'm fascinated and would actually love them to exist," adding, "Of course, it's strange that there has never been a single authentic hide or hair of the Bigfoot, but I've read all the accounts."
On 22 March 2013, Hachette Book Group announced that Goodall's and co-author Gail Hudson's new book, Seeds of Hope, would not be released on 2 April as planned due to the discovery of plagiarised portions. A reviewer for The Washington Post found unattributed sections that were copied from websites about organic tea and tobacco and an "amateurish astrology site", as well as from Wikipedia. Goodall apologised and stated, "It is important to me that the proper sources are credited, and I will be working diligently with my team to address all areas of concern. My goal is to ensure that when this book is released it is not only up to the highest of standards, but also that the focus be on the crucial messages it conveys." The book was released on 1 April 2014, after review and the addition of 57 pages of endnotes.
Education
Jane Goodall is a unique example of academic excellence. She was allowed to pursue a Ph.D. in ethology at the University of Cambridge without first obtaining a bachelor's degree, graduating in 1966. This opportunity was facilitated by Louis Leakey, who supported her education.
Jane Goodall's legacy as a scientist, advocate, and educator continues to inspire new generations of researchers and conservationists, solidifying her position as a leading figure in environmental and wildlife protection.
In 1994, Goodall founded the Lake Tanganyika Catchment Reforestation and Education (TACARE or "Take Care") pilot project to protect chimpanzees' habitat from deforestation by reforesting hills around Gombe while simultaneously educating neighbouring communities on sustainability and agriculture training. The TACARE project also supports young girls by offering them access to reproductive health education and through scholarships to finance their college tuition.
Owing to an overflow of handwritten notes, photographs, and data piling up at Jane's home in Dar es Salaam in the mid-1990s, the Jane Goodall Institute's Center for Primate Studies was created at the University of Minnesota to house and organise this data. As of 2011 all of the original Jane Goodall archives reside there and have been digitised, analysed, and placed in an online database. On 17 March 2011, Duke University spokesman Karl Bates announced that the archives will move to Duke, with Anne E. Pusey, Duke's chairman of evolutionary anthropology, overseeing the collection. Pusey, who managed the archives in Minnesota and worked with Goodall in Tanzania, had worked at Duke for a year.
Goodall is an outspoken environmental advocate, speaking on the effects of climate change on endangered species such as chimpanzees. Goodall, alongside her foundation, collaborated with NASA to use satellite imagery from the Landsat series to remedy the effects of deforestation on chimpanzees and local communities in Western Africa by offering the villagers information on how to reduce activity and preserve their environment. To ensure the safe and ethical treatment of animals during ethological studies, Goodall, alongside Professor Mark Bekoff, founded the organization Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in 2000.
In 2012, she took on the role of challenger for the Engage in Conservation Challenge with The DO School, formerly known as the D&F Academy. She worked with a group of aspiring social entrepreneurs to create a workshop to engage young people in conserving biodiversity, and to tackle a perceived global lack of awareness of the issue. In 2014, Goodall wrote to Air France executives, criticizing the airline's continued transport of monkeys to laboratories. Goodall called the practice "cruel" and "traumatic" for the monkeys involved. The same year, Goodall also wrote to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to criticize maternal deprivation experiments on baby monkeys in NIH laboratories.
Goodall herself acknowledged that feeding contributed to aggression within and between groups, but maintained that the effect was limited to alteration of the intensity and not the nature of chimpanzee conflict, and further suggested that feeding was necessary for the study to be effective at all. Craig Stanford of the Jane Goodall Research Institute at the University of Southern California states that researchers conducting studies with no artificial provisioning have a difficult time viewing any social behaviour of chimpanzees, especially those related to inter-group conflict.
In 2022, Dr. Goodall received the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication for her long-term study of social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees.
* 1986 The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior Boston: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press. Published also in Japanese and Russian. R.R. Hawkins Award for the Outstanding Technical, Scientific or Medical book of 1986, to Bellknap Press of Harvard University Press, Boston. The Wildlife Society (USA) Award for "Outstanding Publication in Wildlife Ecology and Management"
* 1991 Visions of Caliban (co-authored with Dale Peterson, PhD). Boston: Houghton Mifflin. New York Times "Notable Book" for 1993. Library Journal "Best Sci-Tech Book" for 1993