Jane Goodall

Born in London on 3 April 1934, Goodall arrived in Tanzania in 1960 under the guidance of palaeontologist Louis Leakey with no formal degree, only a determination to observe wild chimpanzees as no one had before. Her field notes documented tool use, complex emotion, lasting social bonds, organised warfare, and knowledge passed across generations — findings that collapsed the traditional boundary separating human from animal. Cambridge awarded her a PhD in ethology in 1965, a rare path for someone who had bypassed undergraduate training. She wrote 32 books, starting with In the Shadow of Man in…