| Jane Goodall had no scientific training, not even a college degree when, at 23, she saved up money to visit a friend in Kenya. She was a London secretary and sometimes waitress with a restless spirit and romantic fixation on animals and Africa based mostly on the “Doctor Dolittle” and “Tarzan” novels of her childhood. An encounter in Nairobi with the eminent paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey altered the course of her life, setting her on an unlikely path to becoming the world’s foremost primatologist. In a career spanning more than half a century, Dr. Goodall used her global fame to draw attention to the plight of dwindling chimpanzee populations and, more broadly, to the perils of environmental destruction. Her startling observations about chimpanzee behaviors — from making tools to making war — revolutionized not only scientific understanding of the capabilities and inner lives of our simian cousins, but also long-held notions about what it means to be human. |
