Jane Goodall was born in Bournemouth, England, on April 3, 1934. As a child, she had a natural love for the outdoors and animals. When Jane was about eight she read the Tarzan and Dr. Dolittle series and, in love with Africa, dreamed of traveling to work with the animals.
Finally, at age 23, she left for Nairobi, Kenya. There, Jane met famed Dr. Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey, who offered her a job at the local natural history museum. She worked there for a time before Leakey decided to send her to the Gombe Stream Game Reserve in Tanzania to study wild chimpanzees. He felt her strong interest in animals and nature, and her knowledge as well as high energy made her a great candidate to study the chimpanzees.
In December 1958, Jane returned home to England and Leakey began to make arrangements for the expedition (考察), securing the appropriate permissions from the government and raising funds. In May 1960, Jane learned that Leakey had gained funding from the Wilkie Brothers Foundation.
Jane arrived by boat at the Gombe Stream Game Reserve on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika with her mother. The early weeks at Gombe were challenging. Jane developed a fever that delayed the start of her work. Finally, an older chimpanzee named David Greybeard, began to allow Jane to watch him. As a high ranking male of the chimpanzee community, his acceptance meant other group members also allowed Jane to observe. It was David Greybeard whom Jane first witnessed using tools. Excited, she telegraphed Dr. Leakey about her observation. He wrote back, “Now we must redefine 'tool, ' and 'man, ' or accept chimpanzees as humans.”
Jane continued to work in the field and, with Leakey's help, began her doctoral program without an undergraduate degree in 1962. At Cambridge University, she found herself at odds with senior scientists over the methods she used — how she had named the chimpanzees rather than using the more common numbering system, and for suggesting that the chimps have emotions and personalities. She further upset those in power at the university when she wrote her first book, My Friends, the Wild Chimpanzees, aimed at the general public rather than an academic audience. The book was wildly popular, and her academic peers were outraged. Dr. Jane Goodall earned her Ph.D. on February 9, 1966, and continued to work at Gombe for the next twenty years.
