This text is adapted from an original work of the Core Knowledge Foundation.

Jane Goodall is a very famous primatologist. She is a scientist who studies a group of mammals called primates. Primates are a group of mammals that includes humans, monkeys, gorillas, and chimpanzees. Jane Goodall has spent her whole life studying chimpanzees. She has focused on studying animal behavior in chimpanzees. Her discoveries have made her one of the best known scientists in the world.

Goodall was born in 1934 in London, England. When she was a little girl, her father gave her a toy chimpanzee. It looked so real that people who visited her house were afraid of it, but she loved it!

When Goodall was 23, she went to Africa. She began studying chimpanzees with a well-known scientist named Louis Leakey. After a year of working in Africa, Goodall went back to England and studied at the University of Cambridge. Can you guess what her favorite subject was? Chimpanzees!After finishing school, Goodall returned to Africa and spent the next 45 years studying chimpanzees in the wild. Her discoveries during those years completely changed the way people think about primates.

Before Goodall’s work, people thought chimpanzees were herbivores. She discovered that they eat meat, too. More importantly, Goodall discovered that chimps were quite intelligent. She observed them making and using tools! Before that, people thought humans were the only animals that made and used tools.

When you hear the word tool, you may think of a hammer, saw, or shovel. Chimps don’t use those kinds of tools. A tool is something used to help make a job easier. Tools can be very simple. A rock becomes a tool if you pick it up and use it to crack open a walnut.

Goodall observed chimps using blades of grass and sticks as tools. Chimps like to eat termites, a type of insect that is like an ant. Termites live in holes underground. To catch these tasty insects, Goodall observed a chimp sticking a blade of grass into a termite hole. The termites crawled onto the gras