From the Archive
By Alex Wilkins
I’m not an archaeologist. I haven’t even been a primatologist for a while now, but I know archaeologists love a matrix, so let’s start there.
It’s 8 am on an April morning in 2024 and I arrive for a day of volunteer work in the Presidio, a neighborhood in San Francisco, in the ancestral lands of the Yelamu, a local Ohlone tribe. The Presidio was occupied as a military post dating back to the late 1700s. Today it is a historical landmark. Today it smells like eucalyptus (for reasons you can look up) and the chilly fog is going to burn off soon.
For those not native to the Bay Area, like me, the Presidio oozes “Spanish/Mexican/Californian” culture, a living product of its history. It is full of white buildings, red roofs, and – because on this auspicious day it’s springtime – Dr. Seuss-esque flowers are abundant.
The Leakey Foundation’s office is an old military surgeon’s house. The stairs are a little creaky, the glass windows warped, the history of the building acute and breathing. I am greeted like an old friend, although this is only my second visit. I’ve found that a love and curiosity for humankind has a way of bringing strangers together.
The office is full of knick-knacks. Not dusty useless antiques, but nerdy tchotchkes: skull casts from museums in Kenya and Ethiopia, actual stone tools, old books, seemingly infinite National Geographic issues, woven grass baskets, post it notes and highlighters… I am overwhelmingly comforted by this prestigious place.
My goal, and the reason I am giddy like a child, is to spend the next 6 hours inside the manilla folders which hold a few thousand documents, chronicling the relationship between Jane Goodall and The Leakey Foundation, an organization dedicated to funding and increasing scientific research and public understanding of human origins and behavior.
My task was simple: to prepare each document for eventual digitization. The archive is, unquestionably, full of academic wonder and profundity. There are too many treasures hidden within those folders for this short blog to give Jane’s archive due justice. This is also why it took me so much time to pen this article.
I’ve settled, somewhat inadequately, on three observations that emerged from this rich body of administrative work, tended deeply to, long before Jane Goodall became a household name. I have learned much from Jane Goodall, but her archive specifically taught me about the practice of science, the people behind it, and her emergent legacy.
Practice: Science is rigorous, but it is humble
Most of us can vividly picture a young Jane Goodall with her binoculars and Converse shoes, sitting elegantly, and watching a chimpanzee (David Greybeard, specifically) stripping a stick bare of its leaves, and “fishing” for termites.
I didn’t actually encounter very much of this romance in the archive, though it was certainly there in reports. What I did find was much more…mundane. There are a lot of repetitive United States bank setup documents, confirmations for receipt of funds, thank you notes for those funds, budget line items, shipping, tension over deadlines, supplies lists, and travel logistics. It feels like blasphemy, but at times I was occasionally, unexpectedly, embarrassingly, bored. As a grantmaker myself, though, I find this comforting: there will always be administrative scaffolding behind scientific breakthroughs.
In Jane’s archive, I also found a deep humility. Jane Goodall, our collective hero, sent countless “Thank You” notes to individual donors for $10 donations (worth about $90 today, converting from 1968).
At one point, a storm passed through Gombe and the lights of the camp went out (in fact, I imagine this happened rather regularly). During the storm, Jane wrote her grant report on a typewriter by candle light. At one point in 1979 she was unable even to type, and apologized for her scrawled handwriting, because a bite on her hand became infected and swollen. She never mentioned who or what bit her, so we can speculate together. In 1980, she succumbed to a “ghastly bout of malaria.” The physical hardships truly abounded.
The legacy Jane Goodall left us was built on a sheer number of hours sitting, watching, waiting for something exciting. The discipline of field science, maturing before my very eyes in this old surgeon’s house in the Presidio, is built on a staggering amount of time. Days, waiting for something exciting to happen. Weeks, where patterns are elusive. Years after which questions may, or may not, be answered, building to a slow accumulation of understanding. In 1976, Jane casually mentions being 15 years in, and finally “starting to understand some things.” Only through this kind of long, patient observation can the deeper patterns of behavior begin to reveal themselves, through careful documentation of an individual – in this case a chimpanzee – across the full span of its life.
With the mundane, the requisite patience, and the harsh conditions, what then is the driving motivator? Why continue? Judging by the documents and letters in her archive, the answer is a sincere curiosity.
As much banality is to be found, there is a deep, deep sense of joy and achievement. The archive is full of intellectual playfulness. I encountered, with breathlessness, Jane’s own words exclaiming her excitement: “What a fantastic time we had,” and “Wowie Zowie!” Indeed.
People: Humanity is pervasive in all we do
Today, in 2026, it is rare to see a colleague’s handwriting. We converse instead in emails and digital messages. Jane’s Archive is partially composed of typewritten text, but the personal letters, telegrams, scribbles in the margins offer an intimacy I was not expecting: handwriting. Not even just handwriting, but typos, whiteout, and the yellowish-orange wrinkles of rubber cement. Woe betide the archivists handling documents corrupted by rubber cement…. One of the most joyful elements of Jane’s archive was surely not the rubber cemented pages, but so many whimsical doodles in the margins.
This brings me to my second observation from Jane’s archive, which is the persistent presence of humanity.
We know Jane for her groundbreaking discoveries across all aspects of chimpanzee life, her literal record-breaking studies. Though I assumed this would be the sole focus of the archive, a compilation of documentation specifically related to grant funding for research, I was wrong.
Jane Goodall, in all her global heroism, was a friend and a mother. Jane’s son (affectionately known as Grub) was born in 1967. In 1973, still from her research site in Gombe, Jane wrote: “the afternoons belong to Grub.”
I have no children, but I imagine any parent of a 6 year old knows the afternoons do belong to them. The archive documented one other birth. In October 1976, when Biruté Galdikas, the third member of the famous Trimates, gave birth to her son, The Leakey Foundation broke the news to Jane. Earth-shattering science pauses briefly for the celebrations of motherhood and friendship.
Jane was also a wife. Shockingly to me – a Millennial – Jane’s CV of the 1960s, which she used to apply for research grants, included her marital status. The bottom of THE Jane Goodall’s CV indicated to whom she had been married and divorced, a concept that we would balk at now.
In November 1980, the archive documented the death of Jane’s husband Derek Bryceson, only four months after a cancer diagnosis. Throughout Derek’s treatment from June to October, Jane continued to write grant applications, study reports, and general correspondence.
Jane was also a celebrated leader. Not only at the global level by which we all know her, but also in a very local and relatable way: with food! According to Jane’s archive, every year on the anniversary of her arrival at Gombe – 14 July, 1960 – the research station hosted a bonfire on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, with a feast of rice, goat, and mandazi (an East African sweet fried bread, like a beignet).
Aside from Jane, the cast of characters behind the administrative scaffolding in the story of this archive is vast, spanning from San Francisco with Mary Pechanec, then Director of The Leakey Foundation and Best Supporting Actress in this archival body – to universities in Tanzania itself. Since the 1960s, Jane advocated for the necessity of Tanzanian expertise, calling for increased local staffing and salary bumps. In her words, speaking of Tanzanian researchers: “We really should find it hard to make Gombe go without them.” Starting in 1978, and continuing to this day, The Leakey Foundation’s Baldwin Fellowship supports graduate students from Tanzania and other countries where the fossils and primates are, but where graduate training in these fields often isn’t.
Science spills into the margins with grief, joy, friendship, loneliness, advocacy, and growth. Discovery, especially discovery as profound as that which calls us to “redefine tool [or] redefine man,” is a rigorous pursuit, but it is far from solitary.
Legacy: History is dynamic and participatory
Just as the Presidio itself holds steadfast to the matrix in which it was created, so too are the documents in Jane’s archive present and alive in the physical world of 2026. Most research reports and grant proposals were transferred on to onion skin, a durable but very fine, translucent paper, great for carbon copies. Jane’s letters were sent straight from Tanzania on delicate, frayed blue Air Mail paper, all of which are soft beneath my touch and give that musky sort of vanilla scent of old paper. Many documents have a blooming orange splotch where the staples rusted. In the late 1800s, staples were galvanized (coated with zinc), to prevent rust, but I suppose it only works to an extent. To that: I can’t decide if these documents either transported me back to the 1960s, or if we brought them forward into the 2020s, but either way Jane’s archive is a physical time machine.
Jane’s grants from The Leakey Foundation span from 1968 when the foundation was formed, through 1985, and as these years go by, we see Jane’s celebrity growing. Jane’s archive unfolds day by day, week by week, so as best I can surmise, her star-status was fully fledged by 1983, a full 23 years after her arrival in Gombe. By this point, we are seeing National Geographic Specials, full-length publications, documentaries, and endless speaking tours. This is all available on Jane’s Wikipedia, but the archive reveals the sheer amount of work, correspondence, and logistics needed for history to progress in this specific way.
Though Jane’s celebrity is no doubt remarkable (like her induction into the National Geographic Explorers Society), much of her archive is participatory, with many documents coming from humble and unexpected places. A 7th grader at St. Joseph’s School in Menlo Park, wrote in March of 1977 expressing her own interest in research, and a willingness to help Jane with “the chores that you will not have the time to do.” A 2nd grader in South Carolina asked after Hugo the bush baby and informed Jane his scientific research would be regarding the universe.
Both Joan Silk and Robert Seyfarth sent a research proposals for Jane’s consideration. These are modern-day scientific giants, inspired originally by Jane Goodall. If you have worked with African Monkeys, like me, Seyfarth is truly famous in his own right. The ripple effects of Jane’s emergence into the zeitgeist of science and feminism are incalculable.
In 1978, several years after Jane’s ground-breaking publications revealing tool use, a graduate student asked Jane via telegram whether Chimpanzees have hand preference. The answer is unsurprisingly complex, but that would not be studied until 1991.
I was witnessing with my very own eyes the emergence of legacy, which continues to this day. Chimpanzee research continues into 2026, exploring rational thinking, ethanol consumption, and yes, even crystals. In 2026, The Leakey Foundation is still funding all aspects of chimpanzee behavior research including menopause, grief, and social expressions of aging in Gombe, and other iconic field sites like Kibale and Ngogo. Today, we are also forced to ask how our beloved evolutionary cousins are influenced by a changing climate and the broaching of our planetary boundaries. Jane’s archive tell us a story not just of her research, but the questions left unanswered.
I hope to have children one day. I wonder what questions they will ask? What questions will they answer? Anthropologists or not, how will they participate in our continuing collective pursuit of knowledge, one slice of which is so meticulously documented within Jane’s archive, on onion skin paper, housed safely – but not secretly – in The Leakey Foundation’s office in The Presidio of San Francisco. How long into the future will this legacy resound in young people, with young women?
What now?
They say never to meet your heroes, which is an adage this experience taught me is simply untrue. They say this because proximity to your heroes makes them human, and somehow then… they’ll let you down? But humans – imperfect and full of emotion – are exactly what we need as we face a world without Jane.
It is March 2026 as I write this, and the world is full of complexities, torments, and impasses. How can we possibly ‘science’ our way out of the troubles of our time? How can we possibly speak for those who cannot speak for themselves? Jane understood the infinite possibility of tenderness and hope. She understood our unique human power to redefine what we think we know.
Jane Goodall’s legacy spans conservation, science, feminism, ethics, and our understanding of what it means to be human. And yet the questions and lessons in her archives are not static relics waiting to accumulate dust. They are ours to inherit. Like the Presidio and the body of behavioral research continuing today, we are living products of our history. Jane’s Archive is alive and well, so long as we choose to read, listen, care, and hope.
And in the meantime: Doodle in the margins, don’t use rubber cement, celebrate milestones with good food, show tenderness to our animal kin, and go write someone a handwritten note.
Alex Wilkins is a Portfolio Manager at the Cisco Foundation and Cisco’s Chief Sustainability Office.
After earning an M.A. in Anthropology with a focus around Conservation Ecology, she built a career in nonprofit administration and management. Now, as a grants portfolio manager for Cisco’s climate commitment, she is dedicated to supporting organizations that work towards climate resiliency in vulnerable communities worldwide.
When she’s not working, you’ll often find her exploring the natural world.
