Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

As “Prosector” of the London Zoo—the officer in charge of animal autopsies—Zuckerman later submitted the manuscript of a book, entitled The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes, for approval to his superior in the zoo’s dominance hierarchy. It was promptly rejected on grounds of displaying an undecorous explicitness on matters sexual (for example, “The overlord’s attention is caught by the perineal region of one of his females, usually when her sexual skin is swollen. He bends his head forward, his hand reaches out, his lips and tongue move and, having thus stimulated the sexual response in the female, he mounts and copulates”¹⁵). Zuckerman offered the book for publication anyway. In his autobiography,

From Apes to Warlords, published forty-six years later—amidst much vivid detail of those years—he makes only the most tangential reference to the events at Monkey Hill.

At the start of World War II Zuckerman studied the consequences of aerial bombardment on civilian populations—his anatomical knowledge could there be put to good use. He soon moved on to analyzing the effectiveness of aerial bombing in the accomplishment of strategic goals, where his skeptical proclivities came in handy: The RAF’s Bomber Command (and the U.S. Army Air Corps), he found, had consistently exaggerated the potential of massive aerial bombardment to lessen the enemy’s will to fight and to shorten the war.

After the war Zuckerman headed the London Zoo, and through a few turns in his career wound up to be the principal scientific adviser to the British Ministry of Defence, where his expertise in understanding dominance hierarchies may have been germane. Created a Life Peer, Lord Zuckerman worked for many years to slow the nuclear arms race.

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Baboons as a whole represent only one small corner in the vast arena of primate behavior. We could just as easily have focusedon any of a number of lemur species, species in which females rather routinely dominate males. We could have decided to make an example of the shy and nocturnal owl monkey … where males and females cooperate in child care with the male playing the major role in carrying and protecting the infant, or we could have focused on the gentle South American monkeys known as “muriqui” … who specialize in avoiding aggressive interactions, or any of a host of other primate species in which we now know that females play an active role in social organization.¹⁶

Consider the gibbon. Its preternaturally long arms permit it to make great balletic leaps through the canopy of the forest—sometimes ten meters or more from branch to branch—that put champion human gymnasts to shame. Gibbons are, apparently without exception, monogamous. They marry for life. They produce haunting songs heard a kilometer or more away. Adult males often sing long solos in the darkness just before sunrise. Bachelors sing longer than old married males, and at a different time of day. Wives prefer duets with their husbands. Widows bear their grief in silence and sing no more.

Gibbons are also territorial and their matins serve to keep intruders away. A nuclear family, typically parents and two children, tends to control a small turf. Defense of the home territory is accomplished not so much by throwing stones or raining blows as by singing anthems. Perhaps there are cadences, timbres, frequencies, and amplitudes that other gibbons, contemplating a little poaching, find especially impressive and daunting. At least sometimes, an aging father will confer responsibility for territorial defense on his adolescent son, passing the patriotic torch on to the younger generation. In other equally poignant instances, adolescents are banished from the home territory by the parents, perhaps to avoid the temptations of incest. Adult males and females behave pretty much alike, and have nearly equal social status. Primatologists describe the females as “codominant,” and the partners in a marriage as “relaxed” and “tolerant.”¹⁷

Gibbon life seems downright operatic. It’s easy to conjure up feverish love solos, duets sung in praise of marital felicity, and ritual intimidation chants cast into the forest night: “We’re here, we’re tough, we sing good songs. Better leave our turf alone.” Perhaps there are gibbon Verdis singing power-transfer arias, rich with pathos, soulful lamentations on the passing of glory and of time.