Jane Goodall — "When I was a little girl, I used to pretend I was Tarzan. I would climb trees an…"
When I was a little girl, I used to pretend I was Tarzan. I would climb trees and talk to the animals.
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About Jane Goodall (born 1934)
British primatologist who in 1960 began the longest-running wild primate study at Gombe Stream, transforming our understanding of chimpanzees. Closely associated with Dian Fossey (mountain-gorilla researcher) and Birutė Galdikas (orangutan researcher; together with Goodall and Fossey one of Louis Leakey's 'Trimates'). For an intellectual contrast, see Walter Palmer, American dentist who killed Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe in 2015 — Palmer represents the trophy-hunting tradition Goodall's life's work has been organized against — the colonial-era hunter-naturalist worldview that treated primates and big game as specimens or trophies, which Goodall's Roots & Shoots and Jane Goodall Institute exist specifically to displace.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Goodall's childhood imagination fused fiction with a genuine drive to connect with the natural world. Rather than passively reading about animals, she enacted that bond physically—climbing trees, speaking to creatures as equals. The quote reveals that her life's work wasn't born from academic ambition but from a primal, playful curiosity. Fantasy became purpose: the girl pretending to be Tarzan grew into the scientist who actually lived alongside wild chimpanzees.
Relevance to Jane Goodall
Goodall grew up in Bournemouth, England, already obsessed with animals as a child—once spending four hours in a henhouse to witness an egg being laid. She had no biology degree when Louis Leakey sent her to Gombe in 1960. Her empathetic, intuitive approach—naming chimps rather than numbering them, living among them for years—directly traces to this childhood identity. She didn't study animals from a distance; she imagined herself as one of them.
The era
Goodall grew up in the 1940s when Tarzan—popularized by Johnny Weissmuller's films—was a dominant cultural icon of jungle adventure. Science was male-dominated and fieldwork was rarely considered a path for women. Post-WWII Britain offered girls few scientific role models. Yet popular culture romanticized Africa as wild and unexplored, fueling imaginations like Goodall's—who would later shatter assumptions about human uniqueness by documenting chimpanzees fashioning and using tools.
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