Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

But the females were not mere passive instruments:[W]hen her overlord’s back was turned she quickly presented to the bachelor attached to her party, who mounted for a moment. The overlord then slightly turned his head, whereupon the female rushed to him, her body low to the ground, presenting and squealing, and threatening her seducer with grimaces and with quick thrusts of her hands on the rocks. This behaviour immediately stimulated an attack by the overlord … Closely pursued, the bachelor fled. On another occasion the same female was left alone for forty seconds while her overlord chased a bachelor around Monkey Hill. In that space of time she was mounted and penetrated by two males to whom she had presented. Both of these immediately made off after their contact with the female, who again responded to the return of her male in the manner described above.¹⁰

When females were killed, the males would continue to drag them around, one male after another, to fight over them, and to copulate with their corpses. When the keepers, grimly watching this necrophilial tableau unfold, felt it necessary—for “anthropocentric” reasons—to enter the compound and remove the dead body, the males, in concert, would violently object and resist. Zuckerman, writing back then in the 1920s, used and may have coined the phrase “a sexual object”¹¹ in describing the lot of the female baboon.

We’ve seen in Calhoun’s experiments with rats that—even when there’s plenty of food, even when there are as many males as females—severe crowding induces violent and other modes of behavior that many would describe as aberrant and maladaptive. We’ve also seen in the Arnhem chimp colony how, under similar circumstances, new modes of behavior come to the fore to inhibit violence. From the baboons in the London Zoo we learn that if you take a species given to sexual violence in the best of conditions, provide a small number of sexual prizes to be fought over, arrange to have no pre-existing social order in which the animals know where they fit, and now crowd everybody together with no hope of escape, mayhem is the likely outcome. Monkey Hill reveals a deadly intersection of sex, hierarchy, violence, and crowding that may or may not apply to other primates.*

In Nature, as Zuckerman recognized, hamadryas baboons live much more peaceably. Dominant males are surrounded by a small corona of females, their offspring, and a few affiliated “bachelor” males. These harems wander over the landscape in bands, collecting food. Hundreds of baboons, a kind of gathering of the tribes, camp out each night near one another on sleeping cliffs. Fights to the death for possession of the females (or for any other reason) hardly ever happen. Everyone knows his, and especially her, place. The females are of course routinely abused, bitten on average once a day, but not so deeply as to draw blood. They are certainly not all killed off because they might be interested in other males, as happened in the London Zoo.

Hamadryas baboons in very

small groups behave very differently: A bachelor baboon male watches a couple—on their first date—in an adjacent cage. Days go by, and he is forced to observe their deepening sexual relationship while he sits alone. When he’s then introduced into their cage, he makes no effort to attack the male or to lure the female away. He respects their relationship. He looks away when they have sex. He is a model of rectitude and circumspection, even if he’s of larger stature than either.¹²

Unsurprisingly, there are ways of arranging a primate society so its structure collapses and almost everybody dies. Shall we think of primates who find themselves in such circumstances as criminals? Are they accountable for their actions? Do they have free will? Or shall we attribute the bulk of the responsibility for what happens to those through whose miscalculation the social environment was established? For a society to be successful, it must be consonant with the nature and character of the individuals who must live in it. If those contriving social structures overlook who these individuals are, or sentimentalize their nature, or are incompetent social engineers, disaster can result.

Zuckerman has consistently argued that almost nothing about human nature or evolution can be learned by studying monkeys and apes—quite the opposite of many students of animal behavior who believe that understanding primates might provide a direct route to understanding humans: “[M]y unbending critical attitude to attempts to explain human behavior by analogies from the animal world must have been acquired at a very early age.”¹³ He describes Konrad Lorenz, Desmond Morris, and Robert Ardrey—who popularized, with at least some excesses, the idea that we have something to learn about ourselves from studying other animals—as “three writers who are equally adept at devising superficial analogies.”¹⁴