Jane Goodall (1934–2025) was a British primatologist whose study of wild chimpanzees at Gombe in Tanzania, begun in 1960, showed that chimpanzees make and use tools, hunt and eat meat, form lasting bonds, have distinct personalities and feelings, and can wage something like war. Her findings broke down the line that had been drawn between humans and other animals, and her habit of naming the chimpanzees, not numbering them, helped change how science looks at animals. Therapeutic Shamanism, which sees animals as the Animal People, our kin, teaches separately that our early ancestors lived much as the great apes do, and that Animal nature holds cooperation and competition together.
Who was Jane Goodall? #
A British primatologist and conservationist, born in Hampstead, London, on 3 April 1934. With no university degree, she travelled to Kenya, where the anthropologist Louis Leakey took her on as a secretary and then backed her to study chimpanzees. She arrived at Gombe Stream, on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, on 14 July 1960, accompanied by her mother. Cambridge University later accepted her to study for a doctorate without a first degree, and she was awarded her doctorate in 1966, with a thesis on the behaviour of free-living chimpanzees, supervised by the zoologist Robert Hinde.1
She founded the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977 and the youth programme Roots & Shoots in 1991, which began with twelve teenagers meeting her in Dar es Salaam, and spent her later decades travelling the world for conservation. She died on 1 October 2025, aged ninety-one, during a speaking tour in the United States.1
What did she discover? #
That chimpanzees make tools. In her first year at Gombe she watched a grey-chinned male she called David Greybeard poke grass stems into a termite mound and draw them out covered in termites, and saw chimpanzees strip the leaves from twigs to make them fit for the job. At the time, toolmaking was thought to be what set humans apart. Leakey’s reply to her report became famous: “we must now redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human!”2
She also found that chimpanzees, thought to be vegetarians, hunt and eat meat, especially colobus monkeys. And she found a darker side. Between 1974 and 1978 she recorded a long and violent conflict between two chimpanzee communities, which became known as the Gombe Chimpanzee War, and she saw dominant females kill the young of other females.2 Over decades of watching, her chimpanzees emerged as individuals with personalities and feelings of their own, capable of tenderness and of brutality, and very close to us.
Why did it matter that she named the chimpanzees? #
Because naming treats an animal as an individual. The custom of the day was to number study animals, partly to guard against becoming attached to them. Goodall gave them names, and in the early 1960s she was criticised for writing of their ‘childhood’ and their ‘personalities’, which critics called anthropomorphism, the error of giving human qualities to animals.3 She went on to turn the argument round, asking sceptics to prove that animals do not have emotions. That story, and the evidence for animal feeling more widely, is told in Do animals think and feel?
Were her methods criticised? #
Yes, in one important respect. To bring the chimpanzees close enough to watch, the camp at Gombe set up feeding stations. Some researchers, notably the anthropologist Margaret Power in a book of 1991, held that the feeding changed the chimpanzees’ behaviour, making them more aggressive and more likely to fight between groups. Goodall accepted that feeding added to the aggression, but held that it changed only how intense the conflict was, not its nature, and that it was needed for the study.4
The evidence since has pointed both ways. Researchers at some other sites, amongst them Crickette Sanz and Christophe Boesch, have reported less aggression, whilst the primatologist Jim Moore criticised Power’s case, and some chimpanzee groups that were never fed have shown similar violence. In 2017 Goodall said she would not use feeding stations today, because of the risk of passing human diseases to the chimpanzees, which had not been understood at the time.4
What did she say about hope? #
That it is not wishful thinking. In The Book of Hope (2021), written with Douglas Abrams, she describes hope as often misunderstood, taken to mean passive wishing that something will happen without doing anything about it, which she calls the opposite of “real hope, which requires action and engagement.” Her four reasons for hope are the human intellect, the resilience of nature, the energy of young people and the indomitable human spirit.5 See How does animism respond to eco-despair, and why is activism part of the path?
How does her work sit with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
At several points. The first is the myth of human supremacy. Taker culture has taught its people to believe that humans are the only species that are self-aware and sentient to any great degree, intelligent, able to make tools and capable of complex communication.6 Goodall’s termite-fishing chimpanzee bears on one of those beliefs. See What is the myth of human supremacy?
The second is Animal nature. Therapeutic Shamanism sees animals as the Animal People, our kin, and many of them as highly emotional beings, with the whole range from fear, anger, jealousy and grief to love, empathy and joy. Social animals in particular cooperate, form deep bonds and care for one another, and they also compete, deceive, form alliances and pacts and play politics.7 Goodall’s chimpanzees, with their friendships and their wars, can be set beside that account. Our own early ancestors would have lived in much the same way as chimpanzees and the other great apes, forming pacts and alliances, toppling leaders, submitting and dominating, making enemies and friends.8 What hunter-gatherers then did with that inheritance, keeping would-be dominators in check, is the subject of What did Christopher Boehm find about how early humans kept power in check?
The third is the name. Calling a chimpanzee David Greybeard, not a number, treats him as someone to be known. Therapeutic Shamanism goes further, seeing every animal, and the species as a whole, as a person to be in relationship with. See Who are the Animal, Plant and Stone People?
