Jane Goodall was first introduced to chimpanzees when she was a baby. Her father presented her with a toy chimpanzee when she was one year old. Goodall named it Jubilee and for years the toy remained by her side. Even now, Goodall keeps Jubilee on her dresser.

The revolutionary discoveries that Dr. Goodall made through her field work with chimpanzees are a wonder of the scientific world. Her findings suggest that many behaviors once thought to be exclusively human may have been inherited from common ancestors that we shared with chimpanzees millions of years ago.

Goodall and other advocates helped stop in the U.S. Today, the Jane Goodall Institute supports the continuation of the research she started at the Gombe Stream Research Centre as well as programs in community involvement in conservation, and education.

She particularly liked chimpanzees. One of her favorite toys as a child was a toy chimpanzee which she loved to play with. Jane spent her late teens and early twenties saving money to go to Africa. She worked various jobs including as a secretary and a waitress.

Goodall attended the Uplands private school, receiving her school certificate in 1950 and a higher certificate in 1952. She went on to find employment as a secretary at Oxford University, and in her spare time also worked at a London-based documentary film company to finance a long-anticipated trip to Africa.

the chimpanzee lady

It is important to study the same family group for so long because the younger Chimps will do stuff that we never knew and you will always learn a new thing? The chimps make tools to catch food, they are very protective of their food, they will kill a baboon or another chimp, and they are very curious.

Ph.D.

Unable to afford college and encouraged by her mother to learn typing and bookkeeping, Goodall sought steady employment by attending secretarial school. “She needed to support herself and she and her family felt that with secretarial training, she’d always be able to get a job,” Silvey says.

Her legacy of impact includes the launch of dozens of Jane Goodall Institutes in countries around the world along with numerous Roots and Shoots programmes to inspire the world’s young people to care for people, wildlife and the planet.

Jane dreamt of living in Africa to watch and write about animals. Although this is an unusual goal for a girl at the time, Jane’s mother encourages her, saying “Jane, if you really want something, and if you work hard, take advantage of the opportunities, and never give up, you will somehow find a way.”

Leakey eventually encouraged Goodall to study chimpanzees, animals that he believed could provide us a window into our own beginnings. Most dramatically, her work shattered two long-standing myths: the idea that only humans could make and use tools, and the belief that chimps were passive vegetarians.

When Grub was seven years old, Jane and Hugo divorced. The demands of Hugo’s work as a wildlife photographer who traveled all around Africa and the demands of Jane’s work at Gombe had hurt their marriage.

Jane’s childhood is a happy one with much time spent playing and exploring outside her family’s home in Bournemouth. But World War II is raging and Jane’s father is in the army as an engineer, disappearing from his daughter’s life for a time. After the war, Jane’s parents divorce.

A longtime vegetarian and now vegan, Goodall — who wrote the cookbook’s foreword and offers nuggets of wisdom throughout — shared why she and her eponymous institute decided to create this collection now: “It’s becoming more and more clear that the obsession with eating meat and dairy products and eggs is totally …