KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 30 — World-famous primatologist Dr Jane Goodall credited her mother for her remarkable life and encouraging her to dream and be curious.

She was speaking to a 2,000-strong audience in the packed ballroom at Berjaya Times Square Hotel this morning. It is her first visit to Malaysia and the soft-spoken Goodall completely held the attention of her audience who gave her a standing ovation when she entered the room.

“I was born lucky,” Goodall said. “I had a mother who, above all, was supportive.”

Goodall said that she loved animals from a very early age, and recalled an episode when, as a child, she emerged from a hen house covered in hay after camping out there for almost four hours to watch a chicken lay an egg.

“(My mother) could so easily have gotten angry,” she said, “she could so easily have said, ‘How dare you go out without telling us?’ but instead she sat down to hear my wonderful story of how a hen lays an egg.”

At a press conference later, she elaborated that her mother didn’t mind her getting her hands dirty to satisfy her curiosity. “There’s a sad tendency that parents nowadays don’t want their children to get their hands dirty.”

“Had I had a different kind of mother, all of that might have been crushed, and I might not be standing here now.”

In addition to her investigations, Goodall spent much of her childhood entranced by stories about Tarzan, the king of the apes.

It was this fascination which led her to decide that she’d go to Africa when she grew up and live alongside apes, a seemingly very unrealistic ambition for a young girl with little money.

“Everybody laughed at me,” Goodall said. “But my mother was different. She said that if you really want something, you’re going to have to work really hard, and you’re going to have to take advantage of opportunity, and you must never give up.”

Goodall’s opportunity came when, at age 23, a school friend arranged for her to go to Kenya, where she landed a job as a researcher for the great anthropologist Louis Leakey.

In the one-and-a-half-hour talk, she described her journey from London to Tanzania, how she got a job observing chimpanzees and how she went on to gain a PhD in Cambridge without a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree.

An audience member is moved to tears during Goodall’s talk.

Goodall, who turns 81 in April, charmed the audience members with her descriptions of the different personalities in the troop of chimpanzees she followed, and elaborated on the similarities between the behaviour of the chimps and that of humans.

“Kissing, embracing, holding hands, patting, begging for food — these gestures we share, they mean the same thing,” she said.

However, Goodalll also pointed out that not all chimpanzee behaviour is sweet. She illustrated the shifting tides of monkey politics: power struggles between alpha males of the troop, alliances to defeat opponents.

Chimpanzees have a “dark side” to their nature, she warned, describing patrols by male chimps to attack outsiders and expand their territory.

“They’re capable of violence, brutality, and even a kind of primitive war.”

However, when asked at the press conference, about what implications this had for sectarian warfare between humans, given that we share 98 per cent of our DNA with chimps, Goodall replied that there is a big difference between gang warfare, which she said was “very chimp-like,” and big religious conflicts.

In religious conflicts, “the intellect, custom, and culture come into it, and because we have this amazing brain, we should be able to do something about that,” she said.

While she is famed for her work with chimpanzees, Goodall has focused tirelessly the past few decades on her environmental work. She elaborated on her Roots & Shoots initiative, which brings young people together around the world to engage in nature conservation efforts, as well as her participation in other movements to restore fertility to land and provide microcredit for impoverished Africans.

Goodall said that she felt “shame, anger, and depression” when she thought about what humans are doing to the environment, and reflected that it was ironic that man “as the most intelligent creature on the planet is destroying its own home.”

Since founding Roots & Shoots in 1991 in Tanzania, Goodall has travelled all over the world to speak about and spread the word on the initiative which now has chapters all over the world.

The talk was presented by Roots & Shoots and supported by the Better Malaysia Foundation.

A scene in a video of a chimpanzee hugging Goodall before going off to her new home.