Monkeys Do
Imagine for a moment how differently human beings might see themselves if apes hadn’t survived into modern times. If apes and monkeys were extinct by the time we humans got an inkling about our evolutionary connection to them, we’d reconstruct skeletons and develop theories about ape life based on the fossil record alone instead of also drawing lessons from observation. The size and shape of bone chips would tell a fragmented story. Instead of drawing on reports from the field by the likes of Jane Goodall and generations of researchers since, we’d be left reading tea leaves. We would have been robbed, most notably, of repeated opportunities which the apes have provided to take ourselves down a peg.
Anthropologists long suggested, for example, that humans were the only animals capable of using tools or engaging in complicated politics or developing varied traditions. But observations of chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans--four kinds of great apes--in the wild swept away such assumptions about human exceptionalism. In the profusion of solid, elegant fieldwork on nonhuman primates in the last 40 years, primatologists witnessed chimpanzees fashioning reeds to “fish” for termites and ants, participating in political power struggles, making a kind of shoe to protect themselves from thorns in trees, setting out stones as anvils for cracking nuts and engaging in intergroup warfare.
In “Significant Others,” an engaging overview of research about apes, Craig B. Stanford discusses the importance of limning the connections between other primates and ourselves. Co-director of the Jane Goodall Research Center and associate professor of anthropology at USC, Stanford is a longtime field observer of chimpanzees and gorillas in the wild. His two previous books, “The Hunting Apes” and “Chimpanzee and Red Colobus,” focused principally on the central role of meat-eating in chimp society. He suggested that the kind of organizing needed for a hunt and the divvying up of spoils laid the groundwork for the kind of commerce which required a bigger brain, highly contested terrain among ape researchers. This book is a far more catholic exposition aimed squarely at the general interest reader. It’s a clear and plain-spoken account, admirably stripped of jargon.
Stanford clears plenty of underbrush here, much of it about gender roles and sex. He dismisses the old, entrenched idea that males naturally incline toward polygamy and that females, by contrast, strive toward monogamous relationships. This appears not to be true either for our primate cousins or for ourselves. In the tension between natural selection and sexual selection, moreover, Stanford indicates that female selectivity often holds the edge. “Male ambitions notwithstanding, females choose their mates in nearly all animal societies,” he writes.
Stanford’s account is studded with meaningful detail like his references to studies that show that some mammals seem to assess the strength of a potential mate’s immune system through smell. What’s more, qualities that could place males at greater risk in the wild may also enhance reproductive success: Distinctive coloration in birds, for example, may draw more mates but also more predators. Natural selection sometimes punishes such attractiveness. “But at least some of the traits that females are choosing--whether large muscles, canine teeth, or a kinder, gentler personality--probably exist only because of female choice as the evolutionary driving force,” Stanford writes.
Stanford takes a few shots at evolutionary psychology, a relatively new field, as a simplistic “flavor of the month for proclaiming human uniqueness.” He also lays wood on cultural anthropologists for ignoring the biological bases for culture. Here he seems to engage in a bit of reductionism himself in linking the supposed failure of anthropologists to understand what he calls the “ape-human continuum” or “essential cultural commonalities” among diverse human populations to political correctness alone.
Far more interesting and surely more urgent news is Stanford’s analysis of the plight of apes in the wild. Nearly three years ago, his research assistant was among a group of Westerners kidnapped by Rwandan rebels a few miles from Stanford’s research site. Eight of them were murdered (his assistant was spared). This event rather forcefully connected the dots, for Stanford, between the harrowing conditions for human beings in central Africa and the rising threat for apes. The “bush meat” trade, which stretches from Africa to Europe, amounts to a potent economic incentive for the obliteration of nonhuman primates. Logging and other development projects riddle areas that were once primate habitat. Proximity, hunger, poverty and timber all seem to conspire against the apes. Against these forces, Stanford places a slender reed: the possibility that eco-tourism can work as a hedge against further slaughter.
Stanford is unremittingly clear-eyed, though. “In the lifetime of our grandchildren,” he writes, “apes will probably cease to exist in the wild.” No wonder, then, that the exhilaration he expresses about new insights from primate research is marbled with fear that primatology’s golden age may soon end. The great apes are not like mirrors or time-travel devices, of course. Chimpanzees, orangutans, bonobos and gorillas offer clues about our common ancestor, but they are also due a little respect in their own right.
For hundreds of years, we’ve found ourselves tied to nature through our commonalities with apes and have defined ourselves as human beings by virtue of real, and sometimes trumped up, differences. Defining what it means to be human without benefit of comparing and contrasting ourselves with nonhuman primates was once an unimaginable idea. But, sadly, the undeclared war on the apes renders such a fate imaginable now. Stanford’s latest book makes clear how poignant would be the loss.
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Douglas Foster is visiting professor at the graduate school of journalism at UC Berkeley.
