Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth

On the basis of the evidence presented in this book, we doubt if any of Whitman’s six purported differences between other animals and humans is true—at least given a little poetic license; that is, in the spirit if not the letter of the poem. Montaigne thought⁶ that when we conclude that other animals have “ambition, jealousy, envy, revenge, superstition, and despair,” we are simply projecting our own “sickly qualities” onto the beasts; but this goes too far, as the lives of the chimps make clear. While many commentators have exaggerated the differences between humans and “animals” and warned of anthropomorphizing, others, like Whitman and Montaigne, have romanticized and sentimentalized the animals. Both excesses serve to deny our kinship.

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The proximate cause of human success must have something to do with the conjoining of our intelligence and our talent for making and using tools. Surely, our globe-girdling civilization arises chiefly from these two abilities. Without them, we would be nearly defenseless. But “a little dose … of judgment or reason often comes into play, even in animals very low in the scale of nature,” Darwin wrote in The Origin. Late in life, he made extensive studies of what you might think is an unpromising subject, the intelligence of earthworms. He gave them intelligence tests involving the manipulation of real and artificial leaves. They did very well. Flatworms can work their way through a simple maze to get a reward; even worms have a degree of intelligence. Galapagos woodpecker finches, studied by Darwin on the voyage of the Beagle, use twigs to worry wood-dwelling larvae out of branches; even birds have a rudimentary technology.

Certainly we could not have invented civilization without intelligence and technology. But it would be unfair to describe civilization as the determining characteristic of our species, or as establishing the level of intelligence and manual dexterity required for our definition, especially because the first 99 percent of the tenure of humans on Earth was spent in an uncivilized state. We were humans then, as now, but we hadn’t dreamed up civilization. Yet the fossil remains of the earliest known humans and hominids—dating back not just hundreds of thousands but millions of years—are often accompanied by stone tools. We had the talents, at least in partial measure. We just hadn’t gotten around to civilization yet.

The contrast between the proclivity for tools in humans and the absence of tool use in so many other animals has made it tempting to define ourselves as the tool-using or the tool-making animal—as seems to have first been suggested by one of the members of Josiah Wedgwood’s and Erasmus Darwin’s Lunar Society, Benjamin Franklin. On April 7, 1778, James Boswell confesses to admiring Franklin’s definition. The ever-grumpy and sometimes over-literal Samuel Johnson objects: “But many a man never made a tool; and suppose a man without arms, he could not make a tool.” Again, if we are to define a human being, should we use traits that, without exception, every human being possesses, or traits that may be present only potentially? And if the latter, who knows what traits lie smoldering in other animals, not yet fully elicited by circumstance or necessity?

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Blasé, matter-of-fact, encumbered by the infant (who, face to her chest, clutches her fur), she carefully positions the hard-shelled fruit on the log and smashes it open—using a stone tool procured for the purpose. Hammer and anvil. No light bulb goes off above her head. There’s no chin to fist, no hint of insight struggling to emerge, no moment of revelation, no strains from Also Sprach Zarathustra. It’s just another routine, humdrum thing that chimps do. Only humans, who know where tools can lead, find it remarkable.

Although many chimps literally do not know enough to come in out of the rain, they’re able to use tools. Not only that: they’re able to premeditate the use of tools—to acquire a tool now for some action they intend to perform later. They go large distances to find the right kind of stone or stick, and then lug it home. They seem to have had its ultimate use in mind all the while.