Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

How thoroughly the chimps and bonobos have erased the list of purported human distinctions!—self-awareness, language, ideas and their association, reason, trade, play, choice, courage, love and altruism, laughter, concealed ovulation, kissing, face-to-face sex, female orgasm, division of labor, cannibalism, art, music, politics, and featherless bipedalism, besides tool using, tool making, and much else. Philosophers and scientists confidently offer up traits said to be uniquely human, and the apes casually knock them down—toppling the pretension that humans constitute some sort of biological aristocracy among the beings of Earth. Instead, we are more like the nouveau riche, incompletely accommodated to our recent exalted state, insecure about who we are, and trying to put as much distance as possible between us and our humble origins. It’s as if our nearest relatives, by their very existence, refute all our explanations and justifications. So as counterweights to human arrogance and pride, it is good for us that there are still apes on Earth.

Much of this chimp and bonobo behavior was discovered only recently. Doubtless they have other talents that have so far eluded us. We humans are biased observers, with a vested interest in the answer. The cure for this disease is more data. But the study of primate behavior, both in the laboratory and in the wild, is by and large poorly and grudgingly funded.

If we insist on absolute rather than relative differences, we do not, so far at least, discover any distinguishing characteristic of our species. Shouldn’t we expect, especially with our close relatives, that the differences will be of degree and not of kind? Isn’t this the lesson of evolution? If we require that we uniquely possess tools, culture, language, trade, art, dance, music, religion, or conceptual intelligence, we will not understand who we are. If, on the other hand, we are willing to admit that what distinguishes us from the other animals is more of one propensity and less of another, then we may make some progress. Then, if we wish, we can take pride in the fuller flowering of primate aptitudes that has taken place in our species.

The more an animal weighs, the more of it there is that its brain must control, and so—within certain limits—the bigger its brain needs to be. This is true between species, although not between individual members of a given species. A species with a much bigger brain for its body weight—especially in its higher brain centers—has a good chance of being, on some level, smarter. Indeed, for comparable body weights, humans tend to have bigger brains than other primates; primates than other mammals; mammals than birds; birds than fish; and fish than reptiles.²⁰ There is some scatter in the data, but the correlation is clear. It corresponds pretty well to the commonly accepted (by humans, of course) rank order of animal intelligence. The earliest mammals had significantly larger brains than their reptilian contemporaries of comparable body weight; and the earliest primates were similiarly well-endowed compared to other mammals. We come from big-brained stock.

Adult humans, who weigh only a little more than adult chimps, nevertheless have brains three to four times more massive. A human infant a few months old already has a larger brain than a grown-up chimpanzee.²¹ It seems very likely that we’re significantly smarter than the chimps because we have a significantly larger brain—despite the comparable body weights. For a factor of three to four increase in brain weight, the brain size

(its circumference, say) must increase by about 50%. But the human brain isn’t entirely a proportional scaling up of a chimp brain. Despite what Huxley found, there is a little bit of brain architecture—not much, but some—that humans have and the other primates at least mainly don’t. Significantly, some of it seems to be related to speech.

Some parts of the brain are proportionally much larger in humans than in other primates: The cerebral cortex in general, responsible for thinking, is proportionally much larger in humans than in chimps (or in our non-human primate ancestors); so is the cerebellum, in charge of keeping us steady on our (two) feet.²² The frontal lobes are far more prominent in humans than in chimps; they’re thought to play an important role in foreseeing the future consequences of present action, in planning ahead.*