Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

From infancy, chimps are groomed, chiefly by their mothers. They in turn clutch their mothers’ fur from the moment of their birth. The infant revels in the physical contact, deriving deep and long-term psychological benefits from it. Even if their physical needs are attended to, monkeys and apes that, as infants, don’t receive something like hugging and grooming, grow up to be socially, emotionally, and sexually incompetent. As the infant matures, grooming behavior is slowly transferred to others. Most adults have many grooming partners. In a grooming pair, one partner mainly does, the other is mainly done to. But even the alpha will play either role. One individual will sit serenely while the other combs through its hair, rubs all its parts, and occasionally finds a parasite (a louse or a tick—maybe getting ripped on butyric acid), which it promptly eats. Sometimes the chimps hold hands the whole time. Jittery full-grown males will return to their mothers to be groomed and reassured. Males who become irritable with one another often hastily repair to mutual grooming to calm each other down. It may have been selected for long ago, as an improvement in chimp hygiene and public health, but grooming has now become a centrally important social activity, probably lowering testosterone and adrenaline titers.

The closest human counterpart may be the back rub or the body massage, which have been raised to art forms in cultures as diverse as modern Japan and Sweden, Ottoman Turkey and Republican Rome—where, in characteristic human fashion, a specialized tool, the strigil, was employed to rub the back. Gentlemen in Restoration England idled away the hours by collectively combing their wigs. Where body lice are a problem, human parents carefully and routinely go through their children’s hair. The emotional power of being groomed by the alpha male is perhaps akin to the laying-on of hands by shamans, healing ministers, chiropractors, charismatic surgeons, and kings.

Despite the importance of the male dominance hierarchy, it is by no means the only important chimp social structure, as the grooming pairs indicate. A mother and her children, or two grown siblings, have special, lifelong, mutually supportive bonds. A high-ranking son may be to a mother’s social advantage. There are also long-term relationships between unrelated individuals of the same sex that might certainly be called friendships. Largely outside the male hierarchy, there’s an intricate set of female bonds that often depend on the number and status of relatives and friends. These extrahierarchical alliances provide important means of mitigating or reordering a dominance hierarchy: If the alpha male is undefeated in one-on-one confrontation, an alliance of two or three lower-ranking males with supporting females may conceivably put him to flight. High-ranking males are known to establish alliances with promising younger males, perhaps co-opting them to prevent future putsches. Occasionally females will step in to defuse a tense encounter.

Alliances are made and broken. Loyalties shift. There is courage and devotion, perfidy and betrayal. No dedication to liberty and equality is evident in chimpanzee politics, but machinery is purring to soften the more hard-hearted tyrannies: The focus is on the balance of power. Frans de Waal writes:The law of the jungle does not apply to chimpanzees. Their network of coalitions limits the rights of the strongest; everybody pulls strings.

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In this complex, fluid social life great benefits accrue to those skilled in discerning the interests, hopes, fears, and feelings of others. The alliance strategy is opportunistic. Today’s allies may be tomorrow’s adversaries and vice versa. The only constant is ambition and fixity of purpose. Lord Palmerston, the nineteenth-century British Prime Minister—who described his nation’s foreign policy as no permanent national alliances, only permanent national interests—would have been right at home among the chimps.

Males have special reasons to avoid permanent rivalries. In the hunt and in patrols into enemy territory, they rely on one another. Mistrust would endanger their effectiveness. They need alliances to work their way up the promotion ladder or to maintain themselves in power. So, while males are much more aggressive than females, they are also much more highly motivated toward reconciliation.