Who supervised Jane Goodall's Cambridge PhD thesis?

Robert Hinde supervised Jane Goodall’s Cambridge PhD thesis on the behaviour of free-living chimpanzees.

Goodall began studying chimpanzees at Gombe Stream in 1960 after Louis Leakey encouraged her to pursue scientific training. She entered Cambridge in 1962 to study ethology, despite not having an undergraduate degree—an unusual exception at the university. Her dissertation, completed in 1966, analysed her first five years of observations at Gombe.

Hinde was a British zoologist and ethologist at Cambridge who helped introduce rigorous, quantitative methods to the study of animal behaviour. He visited Gombe and encouraged Goodall to make her observations more systematic and comparable over time. His supervision helped turn an extraordinary field study into a formally documented scientific thesis.

A common mix-up comes from Goodall’s earlier preparation in London, where she studied primate behaviour with Osman Hill and primate anatomy with John Napier. Neither supervised her PhD; Robert Hinde was her doctoral adviser.