Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Another aspect of cultural life sometimes thought to be uniquely human is art, dance, and music. But given pencils or paints, chimps with considerable drive and deliberation make art that, though exclusively nonrepresentational as far as we can see, is thought presentable in some circles.⁴³ Male bower birds decorate their nests guided by an aesthetic that resonates with ours; they regularly replace picked flowers, feathers, and fruit that are no longer fresh; their art evolves through the summer. Gibbons fling themselves balletically through the high forests, and chimps can be counted on to rock and roll at waterfalls and in rainstorms. Chimps delight in resonant drumming, and gibbons in song. Although we like to think it has reached its greatest elaboration in us, culture is not restricted to humans, or even⁴⁴ to the primate order.

Here is a 1932 joint assessment of primate and human culture by Solly Zuckerman:At the one extreme there is the monkey or ape with its harem, frugivorous [fruit-eating], without any vestige of cultural processes. At the other extreme is man, usually monogamous, omnivorous, whose every activity is culturally conditioned. Socially there are no obvious comparisons between man and ape.⁴⁵

Put aside the facts that chimps eat meat, that most monkeys and apes have no harems, and—a fact known even in 1932—that in many cultures humans are not “usually” monogamous; and compare Zuckerman’s assessment with Toshisada Nishida’s, in a much later overview of twenty-five years of research on chimpanzees in the Mahale mountains:[T]he following social behavioral patterns are known to be present in both the chimpanzee and our own species: strong tendency to avoid incest, long-lasting mother-offspring relationship, male philopatry [males remaining in the group they are born into], strong antagonism among groups, cooperation among males, development of reciprocal altruism, triadic awareness [for example, sexual triangles], alliance fickleness strategy, revenge system, sex difference in political behavior …⁴⁶

Much of this may be genetically, as well as culturally, determined, but “socially” there do seem to be some “obvious comparisons” between man and ape.

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Consciousness and self-awareness are, in the West, widely esteemed as the essence of being human (although the absence of self-awareness is considered a state of grace and perfection in the East); the origin of consciousness is imagined to be an unfathomable mystery, or—not so different—the consequence of the insertion of an immaterial soul into each human being, but into no other animal, at the moment of conception. Consciousness may not be so mysterious a trait, though, that supernatural intervention is needed to explain it. If its essence is a lucid awareness of the distinction between the inside of the organism and the outside, between you and everyone else, then, as we’ve argued, most microorganisms are to this degree conscious and aware; and then the origin of consciousness on our planet dates back more than 3 billion years. There were vast numbers of microscopic creatures then, buffeted by sea swells and ocean currents, reveling in the sunlight, each with a rudimentary consciousness—perhaps only a microconsciousness, or even a nano- or picoconsciousness.⁴⁷

Every cell in a healthy body can make the distinction between itself and others, and those that cannot, that suffer from auto-immune diseases, quickly kill themselves or fall prey to disease microorganisms. But maybe you’re thinking that a cell distinguishing itself from another cell (in your body or in the primeval sea) is not what is generally meant by consciousness or self-awareness, that even for exceptionally unreflective humans there’s more to it than that. Yes. As we’ve said, only the most rudimentary kind of consciousness can be imagined in the early history of life on Earth. Of course, there’s been substantial evolution since then. Do we know—it might be a very hard thing to know—whether any other animals have our kind of self-awareness?

This is often thought to be a key facet of our humanity, especially because of what else it makes possible:The attribute of self-awareness, which involves man’s capacity to discriminate himself as an object in a world of objects other than himself, is … central to our understanding of the prerequisites of man’s social and cultural mode of adjustment … A human social order implies a mode of existence that has meaning for the individual at the level of self-awareness. A human social order, for example, is always a moral order … It is man’s capacity for and development of self-awareness that makes such unconscious psychological mechanisms as repression, rationalization and so on of adaptive importance for the individual.⁴⁸