Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (55 page)

Clearly chimps have at least the rudiments of culture. In different forests, they must deal with different local geographies and ecologies. They remember over weeks—maybe over years—termite mounds, drumming trees, or, in one account, the site of a noteworthy combat. Such matters are common knowledge. Each group, with its own terrain and its own sequence of historical events, has its own miniature culture. Mutually isolated groups of chimps have different conventions in fishing for termites or driver ants, in using leaves as sponges for soaking up drinking water, in how they hold on to each other during grooming, in some aspects of the gestural language of courtship, and in hunting protocols.
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And thanks to Imo, the macaque genius who figured out how to separate the wheat from the sand, we even have some insight into the emergence and spread of new discoveries and new cultural institutions among the primates.

The celebrated philosopher Henri Bergson—an exponent of the “revolt against reason” and best known for the idea that some immaterial “vital impulse” permeates life and makes evolution go—wrote that “man … is alone in realizing that he is subject to illness.”
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But chimps have a vast pharmacopoeia all around them, and a kind of folk or herbal medicine. For example, for chimps both at Gombe and at Mahale, leaves of a plant called
Aspilia
are a kind of dietary staple, preferentially eaten in the early morning. Despite the wrinkled noses of those partaking (the taste is bitter), it’s consumed by both sexes, all ages, the healthy as well as the sick. But there’s something odd about it: The chimps eat these leaves regularly, but consume very few of them at any one time—so their nutritional value is in doubt. In the
rainy season, though, when apes are plagued by intestinal worms and other illnesses, ingestion increases dramatically. Analysis of
Aspilia
leaves reveals the presence of a powerful antibiotic and an agent that kills nematodes. It’s a good guess they’re treating themselves. Among other examples, a chimp sick with an intestinal disorder ingested large amounts of the shoots of a plant, different from
Aspilia
and not ordinarily a part of its diet, which also proved to be rich in natural antibiotics.
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How is “chimpanzee ethnomedicine” possible? Could it be based on some kind of hereditary information: You feel sick and suddenly you have a craving for a leaf whose shape or aroma is implanted in your brain from the beginning—like the goslings who are said to be born with a hereditary fear of the silhouette of a hawk? Or, more probably, is this
cultural
information passed on—by emulation or instruction—from generation to generation, and subject to rapid change if the available medicinal plants change, or if new diseases arise, or if new ethnomedical discoveries are made? Except that there are apparently no professional herbalists or medical specialists among the apes, chimpanzee folk medicine does not seem so different from human folk medicine. There’s a common complaint for which everyone knows what medicine to take. It’s something you learn as you grow up. Why the medicine works is a mystery to them—as it still is, in many cases, to us.

Some scholars have imagined that sexual repression was the first and inaugurating facet of human culture.
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Unrestrained expression of sexual desire—especially among young men and women—will destroy the framework of society, it is suggested, so early human cultures must have placed severe restraints on sexual activity, and encouraged guilt, modesty, hard work, cold showers, and clothing. However, there are many human cultures, often in the tropics, with frameworks apparently uncompromised by the fact that adults go around unselfconsciously stark naked—or perhaps with a thin vine or cotton belt that conceals no sexual parts. In South America, Yanomamo women are wholly unclothed, except for such a belt; the men tie their foreskins to their belts (although they are embarrassed should the penis slip free).
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In New Guinea and elsewhere, men cover up by wearing gourd sheaths that immodestly exaggerate their proportions. Before the Europeans arrived, the aboriginal peoples of Australia, even those
in chilly climates, wore no clothes at all. In ancient Greece, Egypt, and Crete, adult nakedness was common, at least for slaves and athletes (although women spectators were excluded from the Olympic games on the grounds that it would be immodest for them to watch male athletes competing in the nude). Nudist camps seem to be models of decorum. Restraints on the permissible can be much less severe than the more repressive cultures ever imagine—as Captain James Cook’s crews discovered in Tahiti.

Victorian sexual attitudes are clearly not characteristic of our species. Moreover, sexual jealousy is a common cause of domestic violence among monkeys and apes; despite their more relaxed sexual standards, they have inhibitions in place. All primate societies, humans and everyone else, set limits on acceptable practice. Sexual repression and associated feelings of shame cannot be the hallmark of our species.

Another aspect of cultural life sometimes thought to be uniquely human is art, dance, and music. But given pencils or paints, chimps with considerable drive and deliberation make art that, though exclusively nonrepresentational as far as we can see, is thought presentable in some circles.
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Male bower birds decorate their nests guided by an aesthetic that resonates with ours; they regularly replace picked flowers, feathers, and fruit that are no longer fresh; their art evolves through the summer. Gibbons fling themselves balletically through the high forests, and chimps can be counted on to rock and roll at waterfalls and in rainstorms. Chimps delight in resonant drumming, and gibbons in song. Although we like to think it has reached its greatest elaboration in us, culture is not restricted to humans, or even
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to the primate order.

Here is a 1932 joint assessment of primate and human culture by Solly Zuckerman:

Put aside the facts that chimps eat meat, that most monkeys and apes have no harems, and—a fact known even in 1932—that in many
cultures humans are not “usually” monogamous; and compare Zuckerman’s assessment with Toshisada Nishida’s, in a much later overview of twenty-five years of research on chimpanzees in the Mahale mountains:

Much of this may be genetically, as well as culturally, determined, but “socially” there
do
seem to be some “obvious comparisons” between man and ape.

——

Consciousness and self-awareness are, in the West, widely esteemed as the essence of being human (although the absence of self-awareness is considered a state of grace and perfection in the East); the origin of consciousness is imagined to be an unfathomable mystery, or—not so different—the consequence of the insertion of an immaterial soul into each human being, but into no other animal, at the moment of conception. Consciousness may not be so mysterious a trait, though, that supernatural intervention is needed to explain it. If its essence is a lucid awareness of the distinction between the inside of the organism and the outside, between you and everyone else, then, as we’ve argued, most microorganisms are to this degree conscious and aware; and then the origin of consciousness on our planet dates back more than 3 billion years. There were vast numbers of microscopic creatures then, buffeted by sea swells and ocean currents, reveling in the sunlight, each with a rudimentary consciousness—perhaps only a microconsciousness, or even a nano- or picoconsciousness.
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Every cell in a healthy body can make the distinction between itself and others, and those that cannot, that suffer from auto-immune
diseases, quickly kill themselves or fall prey to disease microorganisms. But maybe you’re thinking that a cell distinguishing itself from another cell (in your body or in the primeval sea) is not what is generally meant by consciousness or self-awareness, that even for exceptionally unreflective humans there’s more to it than that. Yes. As we’ve said, only the most rudimentary kind of consciousness can be imagined in the early history of life on Earth. Of course, there’s been substantial evolution since then. Do we know—it might be a very hard thing to know—whether any other animals have our kind of self-awareness?

This is often thought to be a key facet of our humanity, especially because of what else it makes possible:

A fish, a cat, a dog, or a bird catching sight of itself in the mirror apparently understands the image only as another member of the same species. If unhabituated to mirror images, male animals may attempt to intimidate the reflection; it must be sensed as a rival male. The image intimidates back and the animal may flee. Eventually, it accommodates to the silent, odorless, and harmless image and learns to ignore it. By mirror reflection criteria, these animals don’t seem very smart. It is said that human children must usually be about two years old before they grasp that their mirror image is not some other child with a talent for imitation. In recognizing what a reflection is, monkeys also are like fish, cats, dogs, birds, and human infants. They don’t get it. But some apes are like us.

In 1977 the psychologist Gordon Gallup published an article entitled “Self-Recognition in Primates.”
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When chimpanzees born in the wild were confronted with a full-length mirror, at first—like other
animals—they thought the reflection was someone else. But within a few days they had it figured out. Then, they’d use the mirror to preen, and to examine inaccessible parts of themselves, looking over their shoulders to view their backs, for example. Gallup then anesthetized the chimps and painted them red—in places that they could see only in the mirror. Upon regaining consciousness and resuming the pleasures of self-examination in the mirrors, they quickly discovered the red marks. Did they reach out to the ape in the glass? Instead, they groped their own bodies, touched the painted areas repeatedly, and then smelled their fingers. They trebled the time they spent each day examining their mirror images.
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Among the other great apes, Gallup found mirror self-awareness in orangs, but not in gorillas. Later, he may have found it in dolphins. We are conscious, he proposes, when we know that we exist, and have a mind when we monitor our own mental states. By these criteria, Gallup concludes, chimps and orangs, at least, are conscious and have minds.
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“As to what concerns fidelity, there is no animal in the world so treacherous as man,” said Montaigne.
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But male fireflies skillfully interpose their own blinks so as to make the courting message of their rivals disagreeable to the females. Some chimp females vampirishly stalk young mothers of their group, waiting for the chance to steal and eat their newborns. Many primates seek surreptitious matings when the alpha’s attention is elsewhere. Few of the male alliances rippling through the dominance hierarchy persist beyond their utility. Deception in the social relations of animals, and even self-deception in animals, is an emerging and productive topic in biology; whole books are written about it.
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Chimps sometimes lie. They also sometimes try to outwit others who are lying. This fact surely affords us a glimpse inside their minds:

And yet it is not so long ago that a modern philosopher, among many others, was saying,

How could he know that?