| 1934 |
Born April 3 in London, England. Her father, Mortimer, was an engineer, and her mother, Vanne, a successful novelist. She develops a love for animals from a very young age. |
| 1936 |
Her father gives her a stuffed toy chimpanzee which she calls Jubilee and has to this day. |
| 1938 |
Her parents report her missing, but it was a false alarm; she was at a chicken coop where she spent five hours observing how the hens lay their eggs. |
| 1944 |
She starts to dream about living with animals in Africa, inspired by books such as “Doctor Dolittle” and “Tarzan of the Apes”. |
| 1952 |
She graduates from Uplands Private School and begins working as a secretary; she also works part time in the film industry selecting music for documentaries. |
| 1956 |
Her friend Clo Mange invites her to her family’s farm in Kenya, Africa. She leaves her job, moves back home with her mother and works as a waitress to save enough money to pay for her boat fare to Africa. |
| 1957 |
She arrives in Africa and within two weeks meets Louis Leakey, a famous archeologist and paleontologist, who hires her as his assistant. In Africa, Leakey and his wife, Mary, had discovered the oldest human remains to date. |
| 1960 |
Jane and her mother arrive at the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in western Tanzania to research the wild chimpanzees. On October 30, she observes the chimpanzees eating meat for the first time. Later, she sees the chimpanzees hunt together and observes two of them, David Greybeard and Goliath, making tools to extract termites from their mounds. |
| 1962 |
Leakey arranges for her to do a doctorate at Cambridge University, England, to give scientific weight to her discoveries. |
| 1964 |
Jane marries Hugo Van Lawick, a Dutch wildlife photographer, whom Leakey had invited to Gombe to take pictures for National Geographic. |
| 1967 |
Their son, Hugo Eric Louis (known as Grub) is born. |
| 1974 |
Jane and Hugo divorce on amicable terms. |
| 1975 |
Jane marries Derek Bryceson, a member of the Tanzanian parliament and Director of Tanzania’s National Parks. |
| 1977 |
She founds the Jane Goodall Institute for Wildlife Research, Education and Conservation. |
| 1980 |
Jane’s husband, Derek, passes away after losing a battle with cancer. |
| 1986 |
After attending a scientific conference in Chicago, Jane leaves the conference knowing that she must leave the fieldwork in Africa behind and work to protect wild and captive chimpanzees. |
| 1991 |
Jane and 12 Tanzanian students found Roots & Shoots, which today has nearly 150,000 members in over 130 countries. |
| 2002 |
The United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, appoints Jane to serve as a United Nations Messenger of Peace. |
| Hoy |
Jane Goodall devotes virtually all of her time to protecting chimpanzees and the environment, traveling nearly 300 days a year. |
