RIP Jane Goodall

[Cattenberg]

I don't think Jane Goodall has a tribute thread of her own. She wasn't even mentioned on the edition of the teatime news I saw the day after she died, presumably due to the horrific terror attack in Manchester.

I admired her a lot. When she started her pioneering field work observing chimpanzees in Tanzania, she had no degree and her work didn't follow the conventions of the time. For example, she wrote about the personalities of the chimpanzees she observed. If I remember correctly, she later said that the beauty of her not having a degree was that she didn't know what she was supposed to think, she simply observed the animals, and she knew that they had personalities. Goodall was able to bond with a chimpanzee she called David Greybeard, an experience she found difficult to adequately describe, but she said it was a relationship of total respect.

Goodall observed examples of chimpanzees using tools (putting grass stalks and twigs stripped of leaves into termite holes then withdrawing them covered with clinging termites). This challenged the contemporary definition of "Man" as the only toolmaker in the animal kingdom. Goodall also observed disturbing encounters that showed chimpanzees were always not the peaceful vegetarians they were assumed to be. She was an empathetic observer, but she wasn't sentimental or squeamish.

In 1966, Goodall achieved a PhD at Cambridge, despite not having a batchelor's degree. This helped her to hold her own in a male-dominated field. She later became a campaigner for the environment and for animal welfare. She was an amazing woman who made a difference. Rest in peace, Jane.

Amazing woman , you're right OP .

Such an interesting life.

Just last week my DD picked her at college to do a biography of her. Alongside Steve Backshall and JKR.

Remarkable woman.
RIP Jane

I completely missed that Jane Goodall was knighted back in 2004 and was therefore known as Dame Jane Goodall. My apologies.

Thanks for the summary. She sounds incredible.

i remember her well having grown up in the 1970s, but my 20 year old DD is also very familiar with her work and she texted me from uni saying she gasped when she saw the news. Her housemates (four women) asked why and she said Goodall had passed away and two of them had never heard of her! Such an inspirational woman my DD was shocked they didn’t know anything about her.

There is a lovely interview with her which apparently she knew would only come out after her death, on Netflix. I can't lay my hands on it but is doing the rounds on social media.

Thanks to a childhood with National Geographic magazines from the late 1960s, I grew up with Jane Goodall.

She changed the world's understanding of our closest cousins and shook our understanding of ourselves as a result. It's impossible to overstate how she shifted the discourse about 'man versus animal'.

I loved her since I first found out about her. Imo everyone should read The Chimpanzees of Gombe, My Friends The Wild Chimpanzees and In The Shadow Of Man.

She's one of the trinity of female primate scientists, along with Diane Fossey for gorillas and Birute Galdikas for orangutangs.

I'm sad to hear of her passing, she lived to a great age & I think had a happy & fulfilling life- one of the kind of people the world needs more of!

Yes, exactly this. It wasn’t just all the interesting facts Jane Goodall discovered, it was the whole game-changing understanding of relationships.