Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

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.