Today I was listening to Jane Goodall being interviewed and she said something I knew about but had forgotten. The whole reason she went off to Africa to study chimps in the wild was because she was madly in love with Tarzan. Huge fangirl!
“He married the wrong Jane!” she laughed.
But she was so caught up in the romance of it all that she literally went off to live with chimps at a time when field studies of wild animals simply did not exist, and women were not taken very seriously as scientists. And basically invented a whole approach to studying wild animals that is standard today, changed everything we know about chimps, and became one of nature’s biggest champions.
Because she loved real animals and one fictional man.
RIP to one of my heroes.
Jane Goodall 1934-2025
jane goodall
Jane Goodall, famed primatologist, anthropologist and conservationist, dead at 91
Goodall’s discoveries as an ethologist revolutionized science, and she was a tireless advocate for the protection and restoration of our natural world.
It was July 1960 when Goodall, 26 years old at the time, first entered Tanzania and began her important research on chimpanzees in the wild. Throughout her study of the species, Goodall proved that primates display an array of similar behaviors to humans, such as communicate, develop individual personalities and make and use their own tools.