Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

They know at best only about 10% the number of words in “basic English” or other minimal vocabularies adequate for everyday human life. This difference has been exaggerated—as by one distinguished linguist who argues that a finite number of human words can be combined to generate an “infinite” number of sentences, and an “infinite” number of communicable subjects, while chimps are stuck in their finitude.⁵⁹ In fact, of course, the entire range of human words and ideas is, as for apes, resolutely finite. The laboratory linguistic accomplishments of chimps and bonobos are in addition to their own repertoire of signals—in gesture, sound, and smell—of which we understand, probably, very little. “The word,” the “use of signs” which Descartes denied to “brutes,” is plainly present in chimps and bonobos.

No ape has ever shown linguistic abilities approaching those of a normal child entering kindergarten. Nevertheless they seem to have a clear-cut, although elementary, ability to use language. Many of us would grant that a child of two or three who has a vocabulary and verbal dexterity comparable to that of the most accomplished chimps or bonobos—no matter how glaring their deficits in grammar and syntax—has language.⁶⁰ It has been conventional wisdom in the social sciences that culture presupposes language and language presupposes a sense of self. Whether this is true or not, chimps and bonobos evidently have, at least in a rudimentary form, all three: consciousness, language, and culture. They may be much less repressed than we are and not as bright, but they, also, can think.

Most of us have a memory like this: You’re lying in your crib, having awakened from your nap. You cry for your mother, at first tentatively, but when no one comes, more emphatically. Panic mounts. Where is she? Why doesn’t she come? you think, or something along those lines—although not in words, because your verbal consciousness is still almost wholly undeveloped. She enters the room smiling, she reaches in and picks you up, you hear her musical voice, you smell her perfume—and how your heart soars! These powerful emotions are preverbal—as are much of our adult anticipations, passions, forebodings, and fears. Our feelings are present before they can be parsed into neat grammatical packages, to be dealt with and subdued. In those dimly remembered feelings and associations, we may glimpse something of the consciousness and emotional lives of chimps, bonobos and our immediate prehuman ancestors.

* Many of them would not have included the word “other,” and even today there are those who bristle at being called—even by scientists speaking generically and without affect—“animals.”* On July 14, 1858, Friedrich Engels wrote in a letter to Karl Marx: “Nothing discredits modern bourgeois development so much as the fact that it has not yet succeeded in getting beyond economic forms of the animal world.”* For example, water buffalo in Southeast Asia, which are routinely castrated by crushing their testicles between two rocks.³²* Watching themselves in the mirror wearing hats is also a wildly popular and apparently gripping experience.

Chapter 20

THE ANIMAL WITHIN

[T]he human brain is an imperfect instrument

built up through long geological periods. Some

of its levels of operation are more primitive and

archaic than others. Our heads, modern man has

learned, may contain weird and irrational

shadows out of the subhuman past—shadows

that under stress can sometimes elongate

and fall darkly across the threshold of our

rational lives. Man has lost the faith of the

eighteenth century in the enlightening power of

pure reason, for he has come to know that he is

not a consistently reasoning animal. We have

frightened ourselves with our own black nature

and instead of thinking “We are men now, not

beasts, and must live like men,” we have eyed

each other with wary suspicion and whispered

in our hearts, “We will trust no one. Man is

evil. Man is an animal. He has come from the

dark wood and the caves.”

LOREN EISELEY

Darwin’s Century¹

We have now brought our story—our fragmentary effort to reconstruct some of the entries in the orphan’s file, to cast a little light into the shadows—to the threshold of the appearance of humans on Earth. It is time to take stock.