Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

When Calhoun crowded his rats together he found a wholesale change in their behavior, almost as if their collective strategy was now to kill off enough of themselves and to lower the birth rate enough that the population in the next generation would be reduced to manageable numbers. Given all the chimp propensities that we’ve chronicled (and the fact, described in the next chapter, that baboons can go into a murderous, annihilating group frenzy when packed together), you might expect that chimps behave badly when overcrowded, as in zoos. In close confines a male chimp cannot escape from an attack, cannot lead a female into the bushes away from the controlling gaze of the alpha male, cannot enjoy the excitement of the hunt or the patrol or contact with females from adjacent territories. You might expect frustration levels to rise, and hierarchical encounters now to involve less bluff and more real combat. If you’re not ready for a fight to the death, you’d better, you might think, find some way to mollify, appease, show deference, pay your respects, perform services, be useful—and genuflect at every step so the alpha harbors no possible misgivings about whether you know your place.

Surprisingly, just the opposite is true. In zoo after zoo, males—and especially high-ranking males—exhibit a degree of measured restraint under crowded conditions that would be unthinkable if they were free. Imprisoned chimps are much more likely to share their food. Captivity somehow brings forth a more democratic spirit. When jammed together, chimps make an extra effort to get the social machinery humming. In this remarkable transformation it is the females who are the peacemakers. When, after a fight, two males are studiously ignoring one another—as if they were too proud to apologize or make up—it is often a female who jollies them along and gets them interacting. She clears blocked channels of communication.

At the Arnhem colony in the Netherlands, every adult female was found to play a therapeutic role in communication and mediation among the petulant, rank-conscious, grudge-holding males. When real fights were about to break out and the males began to arm themselves with rocks, the females gently removed the weapons, prying their fingers open. If the males rearmed themselves, the females disarmed them again. In the resolution of disputes and the avoidance of conflict,* females led the way.⁵

So, it turns out that indeed chimps are not rats: Under crowded conditions they make extraordinary efforts to be more friendly, to be slower to anger, to mediate disputes, to be polite—and the female role in calming the testosterone-besotted males is crucial. This is an important and encouraging lesson about the dangers of extrapolating behavior from one species to another, especially when they are not very closely related. Since humans are much more like chimps than like rats, we can’t help wondering what would happen if women played a role in world politics proportionate to their numbers. (We’re not talking about those occasional women Prime Ministers who have risen to the top by besting the men at their own games, but about proportional representation of women at all levels of government.)

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Students of the chimpanzee call it “courtship.” It’s a set of ritualized gestures by which the male signals to the female his sexual intentions. But in ordinary usage courtship is a word describing a patient human attempt, over long periods of time, and often with great gentleness and subtlety, to build trust and to create the foundations for a long-term relationship. The male chimpanzee’s courtship communication is much briefer and more to the point, much closer to “Let’s fuck.” He may swagger, shake a branch, rustle some leaves, fix her with his stare, and reach out an arm toward her. His hair will be erect. And not just his hair. An erect penis—bright red, contrasting vividly with his black scrotum—is an invariable part of chimpanzee “courtship,” which you might think is a good thing because most of the other symbolic desiderata of courtship are barely distinguishable from those used in intimidating other males. In chimpish, “Let’s fuck” sounds almost exactly like “I’m gonna kill you.” The significance of this similarity has not been lost on the females. They comply. A typical female rejection rate to an unrelated male’s sexual overture is about 3%.