Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

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.