How Does Jane Goodall Work?

to totally reshape her goals. A key to Jane Goodall's persistence seems to have a lot to do with knowing what she liked from a very young age and then just insisting on doing it. She was born in London in nineteen thirty four. Her father gave her a stuffed chimpanzee when she was a baby, and she took it with her everywhere, even though it was by all accounts terrifying looking. She grew up love to observe in catalog animals and dreamed of one day living with African animals

and writing books about them for a living. Her mother, who was a novelist herself, told Goodall that seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea, even though it was the nineteen forties and not at all what middle class English girls

were expected to do. After she finished school, Goodall couldn't afford to go to college, so she worked odd jobs in London for a few years until a friend invited her to visit her family's farm in Kenya, at which point Goodall put everything else on hold and waited tables until she made enough money to pay for the price of the boat fare to Africa. A while in Kenya, her friend suggested that she contact the paleontologist Lewis Leaky, the curator of what's now the National Museum of Kenya,

in order to discuss primates. Leaki was interested in studying primate behavior in order to better understand early human species. He wound up hiring Goodall as his field assistant on a dig, and later asked her to return to England to research primates and raise money for a long term observational study on wild chimpanzees at the Gombe Stream National

Park in Tanzania. So in July nineteen sixty, twenty six year old Jane began setting up her field station at Gambay, which would become the site of the longest running wildlife research project in history. British authorities initially bulked at the idea of a young woman doing this kind of work on chaperone, so Goodall's mother accompanied her for the first few months. Goodall observed the chimpanzees daily for two years

before she earned their trust. Her method was to just watch the animals and imitate their actions, recording everything that happened in a field journal. Two of Goodall's most important discoveries during this period had to do with what chimps eight and how they went about getting food. The Goodall was the first to observe chimpanzees killing and eating's small mammals.

Prior to this, they were thought to be vegetarian. She also made the revolutionary observation that chimps collected and then modified grass stems and sticks as tools to fish termites out of their nests. It was the first time a non human animal had been observed making and using tools, and it prompted science to reconsider what it means to be human in the first place. Goodall's discoveries were so significant that Leaky arranged for her to write a dissertation

at Cambridge University on the behaviors of wild chimpanzees. It was accepted and she became one of only eight people ever to graduate from Cambridge with her PhD without first earning an undergraduate degree. In nineteen sixty four, Goodall married a Dutch wildlife photographer by the name of Hugo Van Lavic. Their son, Hugo Eric Lewis, affectionately nicknamed Grubb, was born in nineteen sixty seven and spent his early life with

his parents at Gombay. After Goodall and Lavik divorced in nineteen seventy four, she married a member of Tanzania's parliament, Derek Bryson, in nineteen seventy five. During this time, Goodall published books about her experiences and research at Gambay, including In the Shadow of Man, which was criticized by scientists because of Goodell's practice of naming the subjects of her research instead of referring to them by number, which was

and mostly still is the scientific norm. In an effort to avoid anthropomorphizing one's animal subjects, she called her most famous study subject David Graybeard, but the book was wildly popular and has since been translated into at least forty eight languages. As she lived and worked in Gombay, she began to notice changes to the chimpanzee's habitat. Deforestation and mining practices forced the animals out of their homes and

into smaller and smaller areas. More than a million wild chimpanzees lived in Africa one hundred years ago, but today only a fifth of that population exists. Goodall saw the riding on the wall, which is why in the nineteen eighties she changed her focus from observing chimps to working to protect their habitat. She founded the Jane Goodall Institute in nineteen seventy seven, which works to keep human communities and wild chimpanzee populations in Africa both healthy and coexisting peacefully.

Another program of Hers Roots and Shoots helps empower young people worldwide to make a difference in their local communities. Having just turned ninety years old in twenty twenty four, Goodall still spends about three hundred days a year traveling and speaking about Africa, chimpanzees, the environment, reducing poverty, and her other passions. In twenty nineteen, she was nominated for

the Nobel Peace Prize. Although Goodall sees with open eyes the harm that we humans are doing to our planet, she continues to be hopeful about our future, she told The New York Times in seventeen quote, the lust for greed and power has destroyed the beauty we inherited. But altruism, compassion, and love have not been destroyed. All that is beautiful in humanity has not been destroyed. The beauty of our planet is not dead, but lying dormant, like the seeds

of a dead tree. We shall have another chance. Today's episode is based on the article Jane Goodall, a Global Face for Globalpeace on HowStuffWorks dot Com, written by Jesslynshields. Brain Stuff is production by Heart Radio in partnership with how Stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.