Dr. Jane Goodall dies at age 91

The Jane Goodall Institute announced her death on social media on Wednesday.

She was in California due to natural causes, where she was speaking as part of a tour, the organization said.

The Washington Post said Goodall was a secretary and waitress and didn’t have a college degree or even scientific training when she first went to visit a friend in Kenya. She had a connection with animals in Africa after reading books such as “Doctor Dolittle” and “Tarzan” when she was a child.

But meeting paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey in Nairobi changed her life.

Leakey realized that a woman would be better suited to observe the great apes because women are considered more patient and less threatening, according to the Post. He hired her first as a secretary, then invited her to go on a dig at Olduvai Gorge. When they returned, he invited her to lead a chimpanzee research project. He said that her lack of experience gave her a “mind uncluttered and unbiased by theory.”

During one trip she noticed that chimps, long thought to be vegetarians, would eat meat. Days after seeing one, she dubbed David Greybeard, eat a baby bush pig, she saw him use a blade of grass to coax termites out of a mound to eat them.

She noticed that chimpanzees behaved like humans, from making tools to the way they fought. Other scientists evolved their research on social behavior among species because of her findings, the newspaper said.

Goodall published her findings in Nature in 1964.

“Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man,’ or accept chimpanzees as humans,” Leakey wrote to his protegee after her findings.

Unlike most other researchers who studied the primates in captivity, she studied them in the wild.

“The longer I was there, the more like us I saw that they were,” Goodall told children in 2016, according to the Post. “We’ve been so jolly arrogant to think we’re so special.”

“Their behavior, with their gestures, kissing, embracing, holding hands and patting on the back,” she told ABC News in 2020. “...The fact that they can actually be violent and brutal and have a kind of war, but also loving and altruistic.”

She became a diplomat for the animals for more than 50 years, using her name to help save chimpanzee populations and speak out about destroying the environment.

In 1986, she was at a primatology conference when she realized that speakers mentioned deforestation at their sites and that she had noticed some at Gombe Stream National Park. It wasn’t until she took a plane flight a few years later and saw rapid deforestation where villages were expanding for miles, wiping out formerly untouched forests, National Geographic said. That’s when she started a mission to protect chimpanzees’ homes by protecting the forests.

She started the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977 for global conservation and the program Roots & Shoots in 1991 for young people to help protect the environment.

Professor Robert Sapolsky, who studies baboons, called Goodall “the patron saint of the field” of primatology, the Post reported.

The institute said in the news release announcing her death, "The groundbreaking scientific discoveries and methods established by Dr. Goodall are expansive and helped to remove barriers for women in science and other fields. Jane’s breakthrough and most famed observation of tool-use in non-human animals is known as the moment that “redefined humankind”. This finding was followed by many others during her research of wild chimpanzees, including the existence of strong mother-infant bonds, meat-eating and hunting, primitive warfare, altruism, and compassion. Jane’s findings also influenced fields of human health, evolution, and ecology. Her passion and ingenuity made Jane a singular figure in scientific and philosophical thought."

She was named a UN Messenger of Peace in 2002, a Dame Commander of the British Empire and received the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom this year. and continued traveling approximately 300 days a year, the institute said. She also hosted a podcast, The Hopecast, which was listened to by millions.

Goodall leaves behind her son Hugo and her grandchildren, People magazine reported.