Jane Goodall
- Words Katie Calautti
From her perch in the tiny Tanzanian nature reserve of Gombe, primatologist Jane Goodall changed how we understand the nature of chimpanzees—and ourse
“People go, ‘You need to slow down.’ But I have to go quicker.”
Jane Goodall knew she loved apes long before she penned her first field notes in the Tanzanian wilds of Gombe. When the pioneering primatologist was one year old, her father gifted her a stuffed chimpanzee named Jubilee. The now-hairless love-worn toy remains one of her prized possessions. As a child, Goodall managed a coterie of creatures at her family home in Bournemouth, England—starting with handfuls of earthworms and sea snails that she snuck into bed and progressing to her first field research project, a stakeout in a henhouse, at the age of five.
“When I was a little girl, I used to dream as a man, because I wanted to do things that women didn’t do back then such as traveling to Africa, living with wild animals,” Goodall wrote in a 2018 Time article. “I didn’t have an...