Dame Jane Goodall, one of the world’s most celebrated conservationists who chronicled the lives of chimpanzees in East Africa, has died aged 91.
Her death, while on a tour of the US, was confirmed today in a Facebook post by the Jane Goodall Institute.
The post said she ‘passed away from natural causes’ in California.
It added: ‘Dr Goodall’s discoveries as an ethologist transformed science, and she was a tireless advocate for the protection and restoration of the natural world.’
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Born in London in 1934, Dr Goodall began researching free-living chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in what is now Tanzania in 1960.
She travelled there despite having no experience or even a university degree to do what she loved – observe and write about animals.
For three years, Dr Goodall watched Flo, David Greybeard, Fifi, Hank and other members of a troop of primates as they lazed about, scratched themselves, munched on fruit and built tools from sticks.
The latter was one of many discoveries Dr Goodall made about humankind’s closest living ancestors.
At first, the chimps fled whenever she entered the enclosure, opting instead to watch them with binoculars from afar.
But within a few months, one primate she named David Greybeard approached her as Dr Goodall held out a banana.
‘Without David’s helpful introductions, Jane may not have been able to meet the other Gombe chimps,’ the Jane Goodall’s Good for All News website wrote.
Her findings, which she chronicled in a 7,500-word report, also discussed her own experiences living in a crude research station along the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika.
‘I became totally absorbed into this forest existence. It was an unparalleled period when aloneness was a way of life,’ she wrote.
‘But I was far too busy learning about the chimpanzees’ lives to worry about the meaning of my own.’
Dr Goodall was ‘the woman who redefined man,’ her biographer, Dale Peterson, wrote.
In 1977, she founded the Jane Goodall Institute, which works to protect the species and supports youth projects aimed at benefiting animals and the environment.
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