Jane Goodall was a pioneering English primatologist (a person who studies primates, which is a group of animals that includes human beings, apes, monkeys, and others). Her methods of studying animals in the wild, which emphasized patient observation over long periods of time of both social groups and individual animals, changed not only how chimpanzees (a kind of ape) as a species are understood, but also how studies of many different kinds of animals are carried out.
Childhood
The older of two sisters, Jane Goodall was born on April 3, 1934, in London, England, into a middle-class British family. Her father, Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall, was an engineer. Her mother, Vanna (Joseph) Morris-Goodall, was a successful novelist. When Goodall was about two years old her mother gave her a stuffed toy chimpanzee, which Goodall still possesses to this day. She was a good student, but she had more interest in being outdoors and learning about animals. Once she spent five hours in a hen-house so she could see how a hen lays an egg. She loved animals so much that by the time she was ten or eleven she dreamed of living with animals in Africa. Her mother encouraged Goodall's dream, which eventually became a reality.
When Goodall was eighteen she completed secondary school and began working. She worked as a secretary, as an assistant editor in a film studio, and as a waitress, trying to save enough money to make her first trip to Africa.
A n Africanadventurebegins
Jane Goodall finally went to Africa when she was twenty-three years old. In 1957 she sailed to Mombasa on the east African coast, where she met anthropologist Louis Leakey (1903–1972), who would become her mentor, or teacher. In Africa, Leakey and his wife, Mary, had discovered what were then the oldest known human remains. These discoveries supported Leakey's claim that the origins of the human species were in Africa, not in Asia or Europe as many had believed.
Leakey hoped that studies