In 1960, Jane Goodall began her groundbreaking field study by living among chimpanzees in Tanzania. In 1986 she told the BBC how similar chimps and humans really are.

On 14 July 1960, 65 years ago this week, a young English woman with no formal scientific background or qualifications stepped off a boat at the Gombe Stream Game Reserve in Tanzania to begin what would become a pioneering study of wild chimpanzees. Her discoveries would not just revolutionise our understanding of animal behaviour but reshape the way we define ourselves as human beings.

Although she was just 26 years old at the time, Jane Goodall had long dreamt of studying and living with animals. "Apparently, from the time I was about one and a half or two, I used to study insects, anything, and this gradually evolved and developed and grew and then I read books like Dr Dolittle and Tarzan, then it had to be Africa that was my goal," she told the BBC's Terry Wogan on his talk show in 1986.

Upon finishing school, Goodall took a secretarial course while working as a waitress and as a film production assistant to fund her childhood ambition. By 1957, she had finally saved enough money to travel to see a friend in Nairobi, Kenya. While there, she arranged to meet the renowned Kenyan-British palaeoanthropologist Professor Louis Leakey, merely with the hope of talking to him about animals. Leakey, whose secretary had recently left, was so impressed by Goodall's quiet determination and extensive self-taught knowledge of African wildlife that he offered her a job as his assistant at the natural history museum.

Leakey would then become Goodall's mentor. "It was he who said, 'Well, I'm looking for someone to go and study chimpanzees because of the light their behaviour may shed on understanding early human behaviour,'" she told Wogan. Leakey viewed her lack of an academic science background as an advantage rather than a hindrance, believing her observations wouldn't be hemmed in by pre-existing scientific theories.

Goodall would not be alone on her trip to the Gombe Reserve. To comply with the colonial safety regulations of the time, her mother Vanne came along as a chaperone. "Initially I wasn't allowed to be on my own," she told the BBC. "The British government as it then was said, 'No, this is absolutely almost amoral for a young girl to go out in the bush.' So, I had to choose a companion, and my mother came with me for three months."

The first months proved to be tough going, with both Goodall and her mother, who were staying together in an ex-army camping tent, developing malaria. Even when Goodall was well enough to venture into the reserve, she could only go out with a local escort, and often at the sound of their approaching footsteps, the chimpanzees would simply vanish into the undergrowth. But as she learnt the forest trails and became used to moving through the dense terrain, "the authorities decided, well, I was crazy and I was OK", she said.

Once she started hiking on her own in the forested hills, she began to catch sight of the elusive primates through her binoculars from a peak overlooking two valleys. It was then that Goodall began to adopt an unorthodox immersive approach. Each day she would edge ever nearer to their feeding area with the hope of being able to sit among the chimpanzees and study them up close in their natural habitat.

"I wore the same-coloured clothes every day and I think the most important thing was I never pushed it," she told BBC's Witness History in 2014. "I never tried to get too close. I would........

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