Back in 1957, a young woman of 23 with few qualifications, and little to sustain her but her courage and some money saved from waitressing, set off from her native England in pursuit of her dream to live and work for wildlife.
Soon after arriving in Kenya, Jane Goodall met Louis Leakey, the renowned paleontologist and anthropologist who was to become her mentor, and began working as his assistant. As fascinated as she was by Leakey's fossil-hunting world, though, Goodall's aim was to work with live animals. Then her dream came true -- when Leakey assigned her to study wild chimpanzees in Gombe, Tanzania.
Together with her mother, Vanne, who joined Goodall for the first three months because the British authorities advised against the young woman living alone in Tanzania, Goodall arrived in Gombe in 1960. At that time, there had only been a handful of studies on chimpanzees' intelligence, which had always involved animals in captivity. From these, it was already known that chimps could use tools in quite sophisticated ways. Goodall's mission, however, was to observe how the great apes live in the wild -- and what she found was beyond anyone's imagination in terms of their similarities to humans and the complexity of their social organizations.