The only monogamous ape, the gibbon, lives in Southeast Asia in small family units consisting of a male/female couple and their young—isolated in a territory of thirty to fifty square kilometers. They never leave the trees, have little to no interaction with other gibbon groups, not much advanced intelligence to speak of, and infrequent, reproduction-only copulation.
Monogamy is not found in any social, group-living primate except—if the standard narrative is to be believed—us.
Anthropologist Donald Symons is as amazed as we are at frequent attempts to argue that monogamous gibbons could serve as viable models for human sexuality, writing, “Talk of why (or whether) humans pair bond like gibbons strikes me as belonging to the same realm of discourse as talk of why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings.”4
If Thomas Hobbes had been offered the opportunity to design an animal that embodied his darkest convictions about human nature, he might have come up with something like a chimpanzee. This ape appears to confirm every dire Hobbesian assumption about the inherent nastiness of pre-state existence. Chimps are reported to be power-mad, jealous, quick to violence, devious, and aggressive. Murder, organized warfare between groups, rape, and infanticide are prominent in accounts of their behavior.
Once these chilling observations were published in the 1960s,
theorists quickly proposed the “killer ape” theory of human
origins. Primatologists Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson
summarize this demonic theory in stark terms, finding in
chimpanzee behavior evidence of ancient human blood-lust,
writing, “Chimpanzee-like violence preceded and paved the
way for human war, making modern humans the dazed
survivors of a continuous, 5-million-year habit of lethal 5
aggression.
Before the chimp came to be regarded as the best living model of ancestral human behavior, a much more distant relative, the savanna baboon, held that position. These ground-dwelling primates are adapted to the sort of ecological niche our ancestors likely occupied once they descended from the trees. The baboon model was abandoned when it became clear that they lack some fundamental human characteristics: cooperative hunting, tool use, organized warfare, and power struggles involving complex coalition-building. Meanwhile, Jane Goodall and others were observing these qualities in chimpanzee behavior. Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky—an expert on baboon behavior—notes that “chimps are what baboons would love to be like if they had a shred of self-discipline.”6
Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that so many scientists have assumed that chimpanzees are what humans would be like with just a bit less self-discipline. The importance of the chimpanzee in late twentieth-century models of human nature cannot be overstated. The maps we devise (or inherit from previous explorers) predetermine where we explore and what we’ll find there. The cunning brutality displayed by chimpanzees, combined with the shameful cruelty that characterizes so much of human history, appears to confirm Hobbesian notions of human nature if left unrestrained by some greater force.
Table 1: Social Organization Among Apes
Egalitarian and peaceful, bonobo communities are maintained primarily through social bonding Bonobo between females, although females bond with males as well. Male status derives from the mother. Bonds between son and mother are lifelong. Multimale-multifemale mating.
The bonds between males are strongest and lead Chimpanzeeto constantly shifting male coalitions. Females move through overlapping ranges within
territory patrolled by males, but don’t form strong bonds with other females or any particular male.Multimale-multifemale mating.
By far the most diverse social species among the primates, there is plentiful evidence of all types of socio-sexual bonding, cooperation, and competition among contemporary humans.
Human
*
Multimale-multifemale mating.
Generally, a single dominant male (the so-called “Silverback”) occupies a range for his family unit composed of several females and young. Adolescent males are forced out of the group as they reach sexual maturity. Strongest social bonds are between the male and adult females.Polygynous mating.
Gorilla
Orangutans are solitary and show little bonding of any kind. Male orangutans do not tolerate each other’s presence. An adult male establishes a large territory where several females live.
Orangutan
Gibbon
Each has her own range. Mating is dispersed, infrequent and often violent.
Gibbons establish nuclear family units; each couple maintains a territory from which other pairs are excluded. Mating is monogamous.
*
Unless you’re sticking with the standard model, in which case humans are classified as monogamous or polygynous, depending on the source.
There are, however, some serious problems with turning to chimpanzee behavior to understand prehistoric human societies. While chimps are extremely hierarchical, groups of human foragers are vehemently egalitarian. Meat sharing is precisely the occasion when chimp hierarchy is most evident, yet a successful hunt triggers the leveling mechanisms most important to human foraging societies. Most primatologists agree about the prominence of power-consciousness in chimpanzees. But it may be premature to generalize from observations made at Gombe, given that observations made at different sites—Tai, on the Ivory Coast of western Africa, for example—suggest some wild chimps handle the sharing of meat in ways more reminiscent of human foragers. Primatologist Craig Stanford found that while the chimps at Gombe are “utterly nepotistic and Machiavellian” about meat distribution, the chimps at Tai share the meat among every individual in the hunting group, whether friend or foe, close relative or relative stranger.8
So, while data from the chimps studied by Goodall and others at Gombe appear to support the idea that a ruthless and calculating selfishness is typical of chimpanzee behavior, information from other study sites may contradict or undermine this finding. Given the difficulties inherent in observing chimpanzee behavior in the wild, we should be cautious about generalizing from the limited data we have available on free-ranging chimps. And given their indisputable intelligence and social nature, we should be equally suspicious of data collected from captive chimps, which would appear to be no more generalizable than human prisoner behavior would be to humans.
There are also questions concerning how violent chimps are if left undisturbed in their natural habitat. As we discuss in Chapter 13, several factors could have profoundly altered the chimps’ observed behavior. Cultural historian Morris Berman explains that if we “change things such as food supplies, population densities, and the possibilities for spontaneous group formation and dissolution, ... all hell breaks loose—no less for apes than for humans.”9
Even if we limit ourselves to the chimpanzee model, the dark self-assurance of modern-day neo-Hobbesian pessimists may be unfounded. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, for example, might be a bit less certain in his gloomy assessment of human nature: “Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.”10 Maybe, but cooperation runs deep in our species too. Recent findings in comparative primate intelligence have led researchers Vanessa Woods and Brian Hare to wonder whether an impulse toward cooperation might actually be the key to our species-defining intelligence. They write, “Instead of getting a jump start with the most intelligent hominids surviving to produce the next generation, as is often suggested, it may have been the more sociable hominids—because they were better at solving problems together—who achieved a higher level of fitness and allowed selection to favor more sophisticated problem-solving over time.”11 Humans got smart, they hypothesize, because our ancestors learned to cooperate.