Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

At midcycle, a female orangutan will seek out the dominant male in her vicinity. At other times during her cycle, young males and subordinate males will sometimes cluster around her and it appears that she is being forced to mate with them. She resists, she screams, she fights, but they mate with her anyway. It is either a good act, or it’s the equivalent to rape. Primatologists try not to use that term. People tend to get upset.²⁶

Lemurs:

In Lemur catta, the incidence of aggression within groups is high, particularly between males. Aggression takes the form of-chasing, cuffing, scent marking, and, in males, stink fighting … Acts of submission include retreat or cowering as a dominant animal approaches, and low-ranking males habitually walk with lowered head and tail carriage, lagging behind the group and generally avoiding other animals. Females are much less frequently aggressive than males, and the female dominance hierarchy is less easy to detect, although the few agonistic encounters observed suggest that it is stable. Yet, “at any time … a female may casually supplant any male or irritably cuff him over the nose and take a tamarind pod from his hand.”

²⁷

Monkeys:

In most monkeys with multimale groups, tolerant or cooperative relationships among males are rare or unknown. Male-male grooming, for example, is virtually nonexistent in rhesus monkeys … [I]f grooming ever occurs, it is given entirely by subordinates to dominant males …, unlike the more reciprocal system in chimpanzees. As another example, Watanabe … studied alliance formation among Japanese macaques. Out of 905 cases only 4 alliances were between adult males. Relationships between males in these groups are thus primarily competitive.²⁸

Stumptail monkeys:

The two newcomer adult females … were thus repeatedly mounted as well as bullied by the three subadult males and the higher ranking juvenile male throughout their stay. This forced mounting might be considered as rape, in the sense that the female was obviously unreceptive and unwilling. She kept crouching while the male forcibly lifted her hindquarters, shook and even bit her, and ignored her screams and dismount signals.²⁹

Stumptail monkeys:

At the very moment that the round-mouthed expression appeared on the female’s face and the hoarse vocalizations were uttered, the equipment registered a sudden acceleration of her heart rate, from 186 to 210 beats per minute, and intense uterine contractions.

Actually, this experiment concerned reassurance behavior. The female’s partners were other females … [It] can be demonstrated that the sexual posture that stumptails often adopt during reconciliation is accompanied by physiological signs of orgasm. This is not to say that sexual climax is achieved during every reconciliation.… [Nature] has provided stumptails with a built-in incentive for making up with their enemies.³⁰

Colobine monkeys:

[I]nfants are often passed around to other females from soon after birth. This pattern may continue for the first few months of life. In particular contrast to some macaques and baboons, every colobine infant has free access to every other infant, and females of all ranks have free access to all infants. Swapping of infants may be one of the roots of the [comparatively] nonaggressive colobine society …

A very interesting feature of colobine intertroop encounters is the fact that they have readily available means of avoiding such contact. As arboreal animals occupying upper story vegetation which provides a relatively unobstructed view of surroundings, and as possessors of loud, sonorous vocalizations, colobine groups could rather easily avoid contact. Nevertheless, contact is frequent. Colobines maintain troop separation by one or a combination of the following: variable movement patterns, the male whoop vocalization, and male vigilance behavior.

 … Excitement is high during this stage, which includes tremendous leaping and running through the tree tops, as is evidenced by frequent defecation and urination. Another indication of high excitement and/or tension is the fact that males may have penile erections …

The most common dominant signals include grinning, staring, biting air, slapping the ground, lunging, chasing, bobbing the head, and mounting another animal. Submissive gestures include presenting the hindquarters, looking away, running away, turning one’s back to another animal, and being mounted … The higher the animal’s position in the dominance hierarchy, the wider the personal space it controls which a less dominant animal may not enter without first clarifying its intent.³¹

Monkeys: