Primatologist, conservationist, animal advocate, and educator Jane Goodall has died at age 91. The Jane Goodall Institute announced on October 1, 2025 that Goodall passed away of natural causes.
Her early fieldwork observing chimpanzees at Gombe Stream Game Reserve, in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), unveiled a rich catalog of shared behaviors—social as well as emotional—between humans and apes. She was “the woman who redefined man,” her biographer, Dale Peterson, wrote.
National Geographic’s role in Goodall’s rise
Goodall came to the attention of the National Geographic Society in 1961. Her mentor, paleoanthropologist and Society grantee Louis Leakey, told the Committee for Research and Exploration—the august group of 16 men handing out grants to scientists, explorers, and others—about his assistant at the Coryndon Museum in Nairobi, whom he’d sent to Gombe to observe chimpanzees.
The relationship with the Society would span four decades, but initially at least, it was not a smooth ride. Though it approved $1,400 for Goodall’s work, the committee balked at Leakey’s request for money to underwrite her living expenses while she wrote up her findings. The men were wary. Jane Goodall was thin—frail-looking. She lacked scientific training. She had no degree. A lone woman in the wilds of East Africa studying chimpanzee behavior, vulnerable to violent weather, predatory animals, poisonous snakes, and malarial mosquitoes? To be asked to kick in 400 pounds (then $1,120) more might be pushing it.
Leakey cannily played his trump card: He told them that Goodall had documented the primates making and using tools—blades of grass and twigs lowered into mounds to fish for termites. Previously, only humans were thought to have the capacity to do that.
