Born in London in 1934, Goodall said her fascination with animals began around when she learned to crawl. In her book, “In the Shadow of Man,” she described an early memory of hiding in a henhouse to see a chicken lay an egg. She was in there so long her mother reported her missing to the police.

She bought her first book — Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Tarzan of the Apes” — when she was 10 and soon made up her mind about her future: Live with wild animals in Africa.

That plan stayed with her through a secretarial course when she was 18 and two different jobs. And by 1957, she accepted an invitation to travel to a farm in Kenya owned by a friend’s parents.

It was there that she met the famed anthropologist and paleontologist Louis Leakey at a natural history museum in Nairobi, and he gave her a job as an assistant secretary.

Three years later, despite Goodall not having a college degree, Leakey asked if she would be interested in studying chimpanzees in what is now Tanzania. She told the AP in 1997 that he chose her “because he wanted an open mind.”

The beginning was filled with complications. British authorities insisted she have a companion, so she brought her mother at first. The chimps fled if she got within 500 yards (457.20 meters) of them. She also spent weeks sick from what she believes was malaria, without any drugs to combat it.

But she was eventually able to gain the animals’ trust. By the fall of 1960 she observed the chimpanzee named David Greybeard make a tool from twigs and use it to fish termites from a nest. It was previously believed that only humans made and used tools.

She also found that chimps have individual personalities and share humans’ emotions of pleasure, joy, sadness and fear. She documented bonds between mothers and infants, sibling rivalry and male dominance. In other words, she found that there was no sharp line between humans and the animal kingdom.

In later years, she discovered chimpanzees engage in a type of warfare, and in 1987 she and her staff observed a chimp “adopt” a 3-year-old orphan that wasn’t closely related.

Goodall received dozens of grants from the National Geographic Society during her field research tenure, starting in 1961.

In 1966, she earned a Ph.D. in ethology — becoming one of the few people admitted to University of Cambridge as a Ph.D. candidate without a college degree.

Her work moved into more global advocacy after she watched a disturbing film of experiments on laboratory animals at a conference in 1986.

″I knew I had to do something,″ she told the AP in 1997. ″It was payback time.″

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020 and halted her in-person events, she began podcasting from her childhood home in England. Through dozens of “Jane Goodall Hopecast” episodes, she broadcast her discussions with guests including U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, author Margaret Atwood and marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson.

“If one wants to reach people; If one wants to change attitudes, you have to reach the heart,” she said during her first episode. “You can reach the heart by telling stories, not by arguing with people’s intellects.”

In later years, she pushed back on more aggressive tactics by climate activists, saying they could backfire, and criticized “gloom and doom” messaging for causing young people to lose hope.

In the lead-up to 2024 elections, she co-founded “Vote for Nature,” an initiative encouraging people to pick candidates committed to protecting the natural world.

She also built a strong social media presence, posting to millions of followers about the need to end factory farming or offering tips on avoiding being paralyzed by the climate crisis.

Her advice: “Focus on the present and make choices today whose impact will build over time.”