It’s possible, we submit, to carry the fear of anthropomorphism too far. There are excesses worse than a surfeit of sentiment. There must be some interior state, some thoughts and feelings among the monkeys and apes, and if they are genetically our close relatives, if their behavior is so similar to ours as to be familiar, it’s not unreasonable to attribute to them feelings similar to ours as well. Of course, until better communication with them is established, or until we understand much more about how their brains and hormones work, we can’t be sure. But it’s plausible, it’s an effective teaching tool, and in this book on a few occasions we attempt to portray what it might be like inside the head of another animal.
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By now, the reader will have at least suspected that the interior monologues of the preceding chapter—the first and third by a middle-ranking female, the second by a high-ranking male—are not intended to refer, exactly, to humans. Instead, we’ve tried to depict what it’s like to be a chimp in chimp society. Systematic, long-term observation of chimp groups in the wild is a new field of science. We’ve relied chiefly on the courageous, insightful, and pioneering work of Jane Goodall at the Gombe Reservation in Tanzania, as well as studies by Toshisada Nishida and his colleagues in the Mahale Mountains, also in Tanzania, and by Frans de Waal, who investigated a troop of chimpanzees in a two-acre enclosure in the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands.25 Every event dramatized in the last chapter is based on the accounts of these scientists. Their observations speak to us of a way of life that is unmistakably familiar, rich with the Sturm und Drang of human relations. Of course, no human has ever been inside a chimp’s mind, and we cannot be sure how they think. We have taken liberties. We make no apologies for doing so, but stress that it is intended only as a way to think about the chimps.
We must be careful of circular reasoning here—foisting human mental and emotional processes on the chimps, and then triumphantly concluding at the end of our narrative how much like us they are. If we’re to understand ourselves better by looking closely at chimpanzees, we’ll have to give great weight to what they do and comparatively little to what we imagine is going on inside their heads. We must be careful not to deceive ourselves. The behaviorists were not wholly misguided.
We didn’t mention that chimps sleep in trees and that they spend a great deal of time grooming one another. Although chimps do not seem as much transfixed by oral sex as some other primates (cunnilingus is an almost invariable part of foreplay among the orangs26), we used the now-popular phrase to “suck up” to someone because it seems to us, in its present English-language associations at least, to approximate some of the nuance of chimpanzee submission. (The gestural vocabulary of chimpanzee submission does include kissing the alpha’s thigh.)
Many behavioral differences exist between chimps and humans, just as between chimps and gorillas or between gibbons and orangutans. But we are struck by how much the core of chimpanzee social life in the wild resembles some forms of human social organization, especially under great stress—in prisons, say, or urban and motorcycle gangs, or crime syndicates, or tyrannies and absolute monarchies. Niccolò Machiavelli, chronicling the maneuvering necessary to get ahead in the seamy politics of Renaissance Italy—and shocking his contemporaries, especially when he was honest—might have felt more or less at home in chimpanzee society. So might many dictators, whether they style themselves of the right or left persuasion. So might many followers. Beneath a thin varnish of civilization, it sometimes seems, there’s a chimp struggling to bust out—to take off the absurd clothes and the restraining social conventions and let loose. But this is not the whole story.
They’re a little shorter, somewhat hairier, much stronger, and a lot more sexually active than most humans are. They have brown hair and brown eyes. In their natural habitats, they may live to be forty or fifty years old—which is longer than the average in any human society before the Industrial and Medical revolutions. But their average life expectancy is much less. Unlike modern humans, females past infancy are not likely to live as long as males. They alternate between walking on two feet and on all fours, using their knuckles. Chimpanzee males tend to have short fuses. They give off a faint but characteristic odor when they’re nervous or excited, revealing emotions they sometimes try to hide. Chimps are not ashamed of displaying their sexual parts. By our lights they’re a lot dumber than we are, but they do use and even make tools. They apparently hold grudges, nurse resentments, and harbor thoughts of revenge. They plan future courses of action.
Family ties may be strong and lasting. Aged mothers will rush to the defense of their children, even full-grown sons. Orphaned infants are tenderly raised by older siblings. They experience prolonged grief at the loss of a loved one. They suffer from bronchitis and pneumonia, and can be infected with almost any human disease, including the AIDS virus. The elderly turn gray, get wrinkles, lose teeth and hair. Chimps get drunk. They’re able to learn more words of a human language than we have of any chimp language. When they look in the mirror, they recognize themselves. They are, at least to some degree, self-aware. Infants get cranky and irritable when they’re weaned. Chimps form friendships, often with comrades-in-arms who hunt together and guard their turf against intruders. They share food with relatives and friends.
When raised among humans, they have been known to masturbate to pictures of naked people. (This is probably true only of those who, through prolonged contact, have come to consider themselves human. Wild chimps would no more masturbate to erotic images of humans than vice versa.) They keep secrets. They lie. They both oppress and protect the weak. Some, despite many setbacks, persistently strive for social advancement and career opportunities. Others, less ambitious, are more or less content with their lot.
Among much other innate knowledge, they are born with an understanding about how to make a bed of leaves each night up there in the trees. They are much better climbers than we, partly because they haven’t lost, as we have, the ability to grasp branches with their feet. The youngsters love to climb trees and rival one another in spectacular feats of gymnastic derring-do. But when an infant has climbed too high, its mother—socializing with her friends at the base of the tree—decisively taps the trunk and the baby obediently scampers down.
The forest is crisscrossed with a network of trails made by generations of chimps going about their daily business. Each knows the local geography at least as well as the average human city-dweller knows the neighborhood streets and shops. They almost never get lost. Here and there along the trails are trees with acoustically resonant trunks. When a party of foragers spies such a tree, many run forward and drum away—both sexes, children as well as adults. There are no strings, woodwinds, or brass yet, but the percussion section is in place.
Chimps recognize one another’s individual voices, and a distinctive pant-hoot may summon an ally or relative from a considerable distance. In answering a pant-hoot from, say, an adjacent valley, they lift their heads and purse their lips as if they were on stage at La Scala. Up close, they have an uncanny ability—“uncanny” means only that we haven’t been smart enough to figure it out yet—to communicate with one another, not just about such straightforward matters as sex or dominance, but about much more subtle matters, such as hidden dangers, or buried food supplies. A classic set of experiments was done by the psychologist E. W. Menzeclass="underline" [Menzel] maintained four to six young chimpanzees in a large outdoor enclosure that was also connected to a smaller holding cage. He restrained all but one animal in the holding cage, while showing this chosen “leader” the hidden location of either an amount of food or an aversive stimulus such as a stuffed snake. The leader was then returned to the holding cage, and the whole group was released. According to Menzel’s reports, the variable behavior of the animals indicated that they “seemed to know approximately where the object was, and what sort of object it was, long before the leader reached the spot where it had been hidden” … If the goal was food, they ran ahead looking in possible hiding places; if it was a stuffed alligator or snake, they emerged from their cage showing piloerection [their hair standing on end] and staying close to their companions. If the hidden item was an alligator or snake, they became very cautious in their approach and often mobbed the area, hooting in the direction of the hidden item and hitting at it with sticks. If the hidden item was food, the animals searched the area intensively and showed little fear or distress. The behaviors occurred even if the aversive stimulus had been removed before the animals were released from the holding cage, so it was not the item itself that produced these reactions.In the food tests, one male (Rocky) began to monopolize the food supply when it was located. When Belle, a female, served as leader, she attempted to avoid indicating the location of the food cache, but Rocky could often extrapolate from her line of orientation and find the food. If Belle were shown two caches, one large and one small, she would lead Rocky to the small one and, while he was busy eating, run to the larger one which she would share with other individuals. Menzel concluded that chimpanzees could communicate the direction, amount, quality, and nature of the goal, as well as attempt to conceal at least some of this information, but precisely how chimpanzees achieve such communication is still not known.27