Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Early in the fifth century B.C., Hanno of Carthage set sail into the western Mediterranean with a fleet of sixty-seven ships, each with fifty oars, carrying altogether thirty thousand men and women. Or at least this is what he claimed in the Periplus—a chronicle that was posted in one of the many temples consecrated to the god Baal after his return home. Sailing through the Straits of Gibraltar, he turned south, establishing cities along the West African coast as he went, including present-day Agadir, Morocco. Eventually, he came to a land filled with crocodiles and hippopotami and many groups of people, some herders, some “wild men,” some friendly, some not. The interpreters he had brought from Morocco could not understand the languages spoken here. He sailed by what is now Senegal, Gambia, and Sierra Leone. He passed a great mountain from which a fire reached “to heaven,” and from which, night and day, “streams of fire flowed into the sea.” This is, almost certainly, the Mount Cameroon volcano just east of the delta of the River Niger. He may have gone almost as far as the Congo before returning.

In the last of eighteen short paragraphs in his Periplus, Hanno describes finding, just before turning back, an island in an African lake,full of wild men. By far the majority of them were women with hairy bodies. The interpreters called them “gorillas.”

The males escaped by climbing precipices and hurling stones. But the females were not so lucky.We captured three women … who bit and scratched … and did not want to follow. So we killed them and flayed them and took their skins to Carthage.

Modern scholars take these beseiged and mutilated beings to be either what we today call gorillas, or chimpanzees. One of the details, the throwing of stones by the males, suggests to us that they were chimps. The Periplus is the earliest firm historical account we have of a first contact between apes arid humans.³

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The ancient Mayan authors of the Popol Vuh

considered monkeys to be the product of the last botched experiment conducted by the gods before they finally got it right and managed to create us. The gods meant well, but they were fallible, imperfect artisans. Humans are hard to make. Many peoples in Africa, Central and South America, and the Indian subcontinent thought of apes and monkeys as beings with some deep connection to humans—aspirant humans, perhaps, or failed humans, demoted for some grave transgression against divine law, or voluntary exiles from the self-discipline demanded by civilization.

In ancient Greece and Rome the similarity of apes or monkeys with humans was well-known—indeed, it was stressed by Aristotle* and Galen. But this led to no speculations about common ancestry. The gods who had made humans were also in the habit of changing themselves into animals to rape or seduce young women: Like the centaurs and the Minotaur, the offspring of these unions were chimeras, part beast, part human. Still, no ape chimeras are prominent in the myths of Greece and Rome.

In India and ancient Egypt, though, there were monkey-headed gods, and in the latter large numbers of mummified baboons—indicating that they were cherished if not worshipped. A monkey apotheosis would have been unthinkable in the post-classical West—in part because the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic religion came of age where nonhuman primates were rare or absent, but mainly because the worship of animals (for example, the Golden Calf of the Israelites) was singled out as an abomination: They were pedaling away from animism as fast as they could. Apes were not widely available for examination in Europe until about the sixteenth century; the so-called Barbary ape of North Africa and Gibraltar—which is what Aristotle and Galen apparently described—is actually a monkey, a macaque.

Without exposure to the beasts most like men, it was difficult to draw the connection between beasts and men. It was easier by far to imagine a separate creation of each species, with the less vivid similarities between us and other animals (the suckling of the young, say, or five toes on each foot) understood as some trademark idiosyncracy of the Creator. The ape was as far below man, it was asserted, as man was below God. So, when, after the Crusades, and especially beginning in the seventeenth century, the West came to know monkeys and apes better, it was with a sense of embarrassment, shame, a nervous snigger—perhaps to disguise the shock of recognition at the family resemblance.