Jane Goodall died at the age of 91. She was the world’s most famous person for studying apes. In a social-media post announcing her death on October 1, 2025, the Jane Goodall Institute called her “a tireless advocate for the protection and restoration of our natural world.”
When Goodall was young, reading and exploring nature were her ideas of fun. In 1957, Goodall visited a farm in Kenya, Africa. There, she met the famous paleoanthropologist (古人类学者) Louis Leakey. He was looking for someone to study great apes, mainly chimpanzees, for what they could reveal about early human history. Once he got to know Goodall, he knew she was the perfect person for the job.
Goodall arrived in Tanzania, East Africa, in July 1960, and journeyed to the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve. She learned early on that studying chimpanzees wouldn’t be easy. To observe them up close, she had to gain their trust. That took months. To her, the chimpanzees were complex creatures with lives surprisingly similar to ours. She rejected the practice of identifying chimpanzees by numbers and gave each of them a human name. In October of that year, Goodall was observing chimpanzees she’d named David Greybeard and Goliath. She watched as they made tools out of grass stems to pick termites out of a nest. Until then, people thought humans were the only species that used tools. Because of Goodall’s discovery, chimpanzees are now accepted as intelligent, social animals.
Goodall established the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977, to provide conservation and environmental education. In the late 1980s, her focus turned to something much larger. Deforestation (滥伐森林) and climate change were affecting the world’s natural habitats. The vegetation chimpanzees depended on for food was in danger. Goodall left Gombe to help. The fight she began against habitat loss continues today, through animal sanctuaries (保护区) and research sites.
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