Jane Goodall once said, “I wanted to talk to the animals like Dr. Doolittle.” Obviously you can tell from this quote that Jane Goodall was very passionate about animals. She was an ethologist, which is a person who studies the behavior of animals, and more specifically a primatologist. She studied chimpanzees in Africa and made ground breaking discoveries about the similarities between primates and humans. So in a nutshell, the research of Jane Goodall was revolutionary and it changed the way that we view ourselves.
Before she was conducting powerful research in Africa, she started out as a normal child. She was born on April 3, 1934, in London, England. She had always loved animals and this was easily seen when at the age of 4 she slept with earthworms in her bed and stayed in a hen house for 5 hours to see her hen lay an egg. See loved all animals but her infatuation with primates stemmed from receiving a stuffed chimpanzee which she named Jubilee, at the age of 2. This was from Current Biography.
Jane had always dreamed of going to Africa to be among nature but it took her several years to make it there. Finally, one of her friends invited her to her family’s farm in Kenya. She finally got to Africa in 1957 at the age of 23.
Jane greatly enjoyed being in Africa and once there she was determined to find the paleontologist, Louis Leakey. She was able to meet him and when she did she found out he was doing a study on apes. He ended up letting her be the main field worker. The scientific community thought that it was crazy to let a woman with no science education run a study. Leakey was aware of these conceptions but didn’t pay them any mind. So in the year 1960, Jane set off for Gombe, Africa to begin researching. Just before Goodall was getting ready to start the study, many researchers discouraged her, telling her that she would never get close to the chimps and it would be a waste of time. Jane didn’t head any of this advice. She knew that