Unsurprisingly, there are ways of arranging a primate society so its structure collapses and almost everybody dies. Shall we think of primates who find themselves in such circumstances as criminals? Are they accountable for their actions? Do they have free will? Or shall we attribute the bulk of the responsibility for what happens to those through whose miscalculation the social environment was established? For a society to be successful, it must be consonant with the nature and character of the individuals who must live in it. If those contriving social structures overlook who these individuals are, or sentimentalize their nature, or are incompetent social engineers, disaster can result.
Zuckerman has consistently argued that almost nothing about human nature or evolution can be learned by studying monkeys and apes—quite the opposite of many students of animal behavior who believe that understanding primates might provide a direct route to understanding humans: “[M]y unbending critical attitude to attempts to explain human behavior by analogies from the animal world must have been acquired at a very early age.”13 He describes Konrad Lorenz, Desmond Morris, and Robert Ardrey—who popularized, with at least some excesses, the idea that we have something to learn about ourselves from studying other animals—as “three writers who are equally adept at devising superficial analogies.”14
As “Prosector” of the London Zoo—the officer in charge of animal autopsies—Zuckerman later submitted the manuscript of a book, entitled The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes, for approval to his superior in the zoo’s dominance hierarchy. It was promptly rejected on grounds of displaying an undecorous explicitness on matters sexual (for example, “The overlord’s attention is caught by the perineal region of one of his females, usually when her sexual skin is swollen. He bends his head forward, his hand reaches out, his lips and tongue move and, having thus stimulated the sexual response in the female, he mounts and copulates”15). Zuckerman offered the book for publication anyway. In his autobiography, From Apes to Warlords, published forty-six years later—amidst much vivid detail of those years—he makes only the most tangential reference to the events at Monkey Hill.
At the start of World War II Zuckerman studied the consequences of aerial bombardment on civilian populations—his anatomical knowledge could there be put to good use. He soon moved on to analyzing the effectiveness of aerial bombing in the accomplishment of strategic goals, where his skeptical proclivities came in handy: The RAF’s Bomber Command (and the U.S. Army Air Corps), he found, had consistently exaggerated the potential of massive aerial bombardment to lessen the enemy’s will to fight and to shorten the war.
After the war Zuckerman headed the London Zoo, and through a few turns in his career wound up to be the principal scientific adviser to the British Ministry of Defence, where his expertise in understanding dominance hierarchies may have been germane. Created a Life Peer, Lord Zuckerman worked for many years to slow the nuclear arms race.
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Baboons as a whole represent only one small corner in the vast arena of primate behavior. We could just as easily have focusedon any of a number of lemur species, species in which females rather routinely dominate males. We could have decided to make an example of the shy and nocturnal owl monkey … where males and females cooperate in child care with the male playing the major role in carrying and protecting the infant, or we could have focused on the gentle South American monkeys known as “muriqui” … who specialize in avoiding aggressive interactions, or any of a host of other primate species in which we now know that females play an active role in social organization.16
Consider the gibbon. Its preternaturally long arms permit it to make great balletic leaps through the canopy of the forest—sometimes ten meters or more from branch to branch—that put champion human gymnasts to shame. Gibbons are, apparently without exception, monogamous. They marry for life. They produce haunting songs heard a kilometer or more away. Adult males often sing long solos in the darkness just before sunrise. Bachelors sing longer than old married males, and at a different time of day. Wives prefer duets with their husbands. Widows bear their grief in silence and sing no more.
Gibbons are also territorial and their matins serve to keep intruders away. A nuclear family, typically parents and two children, tends to control a small turf. Defense of the home territory is accomplished not so much by throwing stones or raining blows as by singing anthems. Perhaps there are cadences, timbres, frequencies, and amplitudes that other gibbons, contemplating a little poaching, find especially impressive and daunting. At least sometimes, an aging father will confer responsibility for territorial defense on his adolescent son, passing the patriotic torch on to the younger generation. In other equally poignant instances, adolescents are banished from the home territory by the parents, perhaps to avoid the temptations of incest. Adult males and females behave pretty much alike, and have nearly equal social status. Primatologists describe the females as “codominant,” and the partners in a marriage as “relaxed” and “tolerant.”17
Gibbon life seems downright operatic. It’s easy to conjure up feverish love solos, duets sung in praise of marital felicity, and ritual intimidation chants cast into the forest night: “We’re here, we’re tough, we sing good songs. Better leave our turf alone.” Perhaps there are gibbon Verdis singing power-transfer arias, rich with pathos, soulful lamentations on the passing of glory and of time.
Or consider the bonobo. This is a reclusive species or subspecies of chimpanzee that lives in a single group in Central Africa, south of the Zaire River.18 Bonobos have certain traits that render them conventionally ineligible for the local zoo, which may be one reason that they’re not nearly so well known as the common chimp we’ve described in the preceding chapters. Bonobos, given the Linnaean name Pan paniscus, are also called pygmy chimpanzees; they’re smaller and more slender and their faces protrude less than the usual variety, Pan troglodytes, which we’ll here and there continue to describe simply as chimpanzees.* Bonobos often stand up and walk on two legs. (They have a kind of webbing of skin between their second and third toes.) They stride with their shoulders squared and do not slouch as much as chimps do. “When bonobos stand upright,” writes de Waal, “they look as if they had walked straight out of an artist’s impression of prehistoric man.”19
Unlike chimp females, among whom estrus is advertised and is a time of pronounced sexual receptivity, bonobo females display genital swellings about half the time; and they’re nearly always attractive to the adult males. We recall that common chimps, Pan troglodytes, like almost all animals, have sex with the male entering the female’s vagina from behind, his front against her back. But in bonobos, about a quarter of the time, the matings are face-to-face. This is the position the females seem to prefer, probably because their clitorises are large and positioned far forward compared to chimps. Bonobos indicate their mutual attraction by prolonged gazing into one another’s eyes, a practice which precedes almost all their matings, and which is unknown among common chimps. The initiation of sexual activity among the bonobos is mutual, unlike the chimps, where it is peremptory and nearly always by the males. While in general, especially in larger social contexts, male bonobos dominate females, this is not always the case, especially when they’re alone together. At night, in the forest canopy, a male and a female will sometimes snuggle up together in the same nest of leaves. Adult chimps never do.