Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

by Carl Sagan

  * “[An ape’s] face resembles that of a man in many respects … [I]t has similar nostrils and ears, and teeth like those of man, both front teeth and molars … [I]t has hands and fingers and nails like man, only that all these parts are somewhat more beastlike in appearance. Its feet are exceptional. . like large hands … [T]he internal organs are found on dissection to correspond to those of man”4

  * Savage also wrote the first systematic account of gorillas in the wild, and was responsible for the modern use of the ancient North African word “gorilla”. He took pains to repudiate popular notions of gorillas carrying off attractive women for unspeakable purposes—the theme echoed a century later to enormous public acclaim in the motion picture King Kong.

  * The soldiers of Alexander the Great—not otherwise known for their prudishness—are said, in their India campaign, to have put monkeys to death for their “lasciviousness.”13

  * Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in 1753, had gone further and classified chimps and men as members of the same species, the power of speech being at the beginning, in his view, not “natural to man.”15 Congreve had toyed with something similar.

  * A young mother will not usually come again into estrus until she weans her infant. The little one, understandably enough, may interpret weaning as rejection. The mother’s renewed sexual interest in adult (and sub-adult) males probably compounds the infant’s agony and resentment. Perhaps we also share the Oedipus complex with the apes.

  Chapter 16

  LIVES OF THE APES

  I hear the apes howl sadly

  In dark mountains.

  The blue river

  Flows swiftly through the night.

  MENG HAU-RAN

  (Tang Dynasty, early 730s),

  “Written for Old Friends in

  Yang-jou City While Spending the

  Night on the Tung-lu River”1

  The alpha male is sitting bolt upright, jaw set, staring confidently into middle distance. The hair on his head, shoulders, and back is standing on end, which gives him an even more imposing aspect. Before him crouches a subordinate, in a bow so deep that his gaze must be fixed on the few tufts of grass directly before him. If these were humans, this posture would be recognized as much more than deference. This is abject submission. This is abasement. This is groveling. The alpha’s feet may, in fact, be kissed. The supplicant could be a vanquished provincial chieftain at the foot of the Chinese or Ottoman Emperor, or a tenth-century Catholic priest before the Bishop of Rome, or an awed ambassador of a tributary people in the presence of Pharaoh.2

  Calm and assured, the alpha male does not scowl at his nearly prostrate subordinate. Instead, he reaches out and touches him on the shoulder or head. The lower-ranking male slowly rises, reassured. Alpha ambles off, touching, patting, hugging, occasionally kissing those he encounters. Many reach out their arms and beg for contact, however brief. Almost all—from highest to lowest rank—are visibly buoyed by this king’s touch. Anxiety is relieved, perhaps even minor illnesses cured, by the laying-on of hands.

  Regal touching, one after the other, in a sea of outstretched hands seems familiar enough to us—reminiscent, say, of the President striding down the central aisle of the House of Representatives just before the State of the Union address, especially when he’s riding high in the polls. The future King Edward VIII on his world tour, Senator Robert Kennpdy in his presidential campaign, and countless other political leaders have returned home black and blue from the grasp of their enthusiastic followers.

  The alpha male will intervene to prevent conflict, especially between hotheaded young males pumped up on testosterone, or when aggression is directed at infants or juveniles. Sometimes a withering glance will suffice. Sometimes the alpha will charge the pair and force them apart. Generally, he approaches with a swagger, arms akimbo. It’s hard not to see here the rudiments of government administration of justice. As in all primate leadership positions, an alpha male must accept certain obligations. In return for deference and respect, for sexual and dining privileges, he must render services to the community, both practical and symbolic. He adopts an impressive demeanor, even something approaching pomp, in part because his subordinates demand it of him. They crave reassurance. They are natural followers. They have an irresistible need to be led.

  Beyond the reaching out of hands there are many styles of submission, of which the most common is, in the scientific literature, demurely called “presenting.” What is it that’s being presented? The subordinate animal, male or female—but here we’re discussing males in the dominance hierarchy—wishing to pay its respects to the alpha male crouches down and elevates its anogenital region toward the leader, moving its tail out of the way. It sometimes gives a little bump and grind. It may whimper and, grinning over its shoulder, approach the alpha, raised rump first. The subordinate’s need to pay respect in this manner is so great that it may even present to an alpha who’s fast asleep.

  The alpha (if awake) moves forward, grasps the submissive animal from behind, closely embraces it, and not infrequently makes a few pelvic thrusts. Since this is the invariable posture and motion of chimp copulation, there can be no mistaking the symbolic significance of the exchange: The subordinate animal asks please to be fucked, and the dominant animal, perhaps a little reluctantly, complies.

  In most cases these actions are only symbolic. There is no intromission and no orgasm. They fake it. You wish to pay respect to a high-ranking male, but Nature has not equipped you with appropriate spoken language. Still, there are many postures and gestures in your everyday life that have a meaning readily apprehended by everyone. If females must comply with nearly every proferred sexual invitation, the sex act itself is a vivid, powerful, and unambiguous symbol of submission. Indeed, presenting is a mark of deference and respect among all the apes and monkeys, and among many other mammals as well.

  The anger of a high-ranking male is fearsome. His arousal is obvious to any bystander, because all the hair on his body is standing on end. He may charge, intimidate, and tear branches from trees. If you’re not prepared to meet him in single combat, you might want to appease him, to keep him happy. You closely monitor the slightest raising of a single one of his hairs. Not only are you perpetually compliant (“I’m yours whenever you want me”), but just for your own comfort you need frequent reassurance that he’s not angry with you. When he is angry, he exaggerates his size and ferocity and displays the weapons that he will bring to bear if the adversary does not submit. He uses his displays to keep more junior males in line, and they use theirs to advance within the hierarchy. Displays may serve as a response to a challenge, or just as a general reminder to the community at large that here’s someone not to be trifled with. Of course, it’s not all bluff; if it were, it wouldn’t work. There must be a credible threat of violence. A kind of menace maintenance is required. If push comes to shove there may be serious fighting. But much more often the display has a ritual and ceremonial character. (Almost always the alpha wins, and if, on occasion, he loses, that doesn’t usually mean that the hierarchy has been inverted; for that to happen, a consistent pattern of defeat is needed.)

  The lesson being communicated is deterrence, pure and simple: “Cross me and you’ll have to deal with this stature, these muscles, these teeth (note my canines), this rage.” Chimpanzee strategy is encapsulated in the earliest comprehensive account we have of human military affairs, the sixth-century B.C. work The Art of War, by Sun Tzu: “The supreme act of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”3 Deterrence is old. And so is its prerequisite, imagination.

  So law and order are maintained, and the status of the leadership preserved through the threat (and, if necessary, the reality) of violence; but also through patronage delivered to constituents, and through the widespread craving to have a hero to admire, who can tell you what to do—especially when there’s a threat from outside the group. Violence and intimidation alone would not suffice—although there may be those who enjoy being chastised and
bullied, who perhaps look on it as a form of affection.

  Male chimps are obsessively motivated to work their way up the dominance ladder. This involves courage, fighting ability, often size, and always real skill in ward-heeler politics. The higher his rank, the fewer the attacks on him by other males and the more gratifying instances of deference and submission. But the higher his rank the more he will be obliged to take pains to reassure subordinates. The dominance hierarchy makes for a stable community not only because the high-ranking males break up fights among their subordinates, but also because the very existence of hierarchy, along with the genetic tradition of compliance, inhibits conflict. One powerful motivation to be high-ranking is that the top echelons often have preferential sexual access to ovulating females. As in all mammals, this behavior is mediated by testosterone and related steroid hormones. Leaving more offspring is what natural selection is about. For this reason alone, hierarchy makes evolutionary sense.

  The alpha male, merely by virtue of his exalted status, stimulates the formation of cabals to depose him. A lower-ranking male may challenge the alpha by bluff, intimidation, or real combat, as a step towards reversing their relative status. Especially under crowded conditions, females can play a central role in encouraging and helping to implement coups d’état. But the alpha male is often prepared single-handedly to take on coalitions of two, three, or four opponents.

  Alphas enforce authority; betas and others sometimes challenge it—not on abstract philosophical grounds, but as a means to selfish ends. We might guess that both warring inclinations are built into us too, a different balance in different people, with much depending on the social environment. The roots of tyranny and freedom trace back to long before recorded history, and are etched in our genes.

  Over a period of years in a typical small chimpanzee group, half a dozen different males may become alpha in succession—because of death or illness of the dominant male, or because of challenges from below. On the other hand, an alpha male maintaining his status for a decade is not unknown either. Perhaps coincidentally, these terms of office are roughly those typical of human governments—ranging, respectively, from Italy, say, to France. Political assassination—that is, dominance combat in which the loser dies—is rare.

  In combat, males are more likely to hit, kick, stomp, drag, and wrestle. Or throw stones and beat with clubs, if any are handy. Females are more likely to pull hair and scratch, and to grapple and roll. For all their baring of teeth, males rarely bite anyone in the group, because their canines can do terrible damage. They may flash the razors and switch-blade knives, but they hardly ever draw blood. Females with much less prominent canines have fewer inhibitions. Any given fight is likely to stimulate other fights among unrelated or even nonaligned parties. One combatant may poignantly appeal for aid from passersby, who may, in any case, be attacked for no apparent reason. Any conflict seems to raise the testosterone level in all the male bystanders. Everyone’s hair stands on end. Perhaps long-standing resentments flare. General mayhem often results.

  Chimps will place their fingers between the teeth of a high-ranking male and derive reassurance when the fingers are returned intact. At times of rising group tension, male chimps may touch or heft each other’s testicles, as the ancient Hebrews and Romans are said to have done upon concluding a treaty, or testifying before a tribunal. Indeed the root of “testify” and “testimony” is the Latin word, testis. The significance of the gesture, less common now that men wear pants, is not only transcultural, but trans-species.

  ——

  From infancy, chimps are groomed, chiefly by their mothers. They in turn clutch their mothers’ fur from the moment of their birth. The infant revels in the physical contact, deriving deep and long-term psychological benefits from it. Even if their physical needs are attended to, monkeys and apes that, as infants, don’t receive something like hugging and grooming, grow up to be socially, emotionally, and sexually incompetent. As the infant matures, grooming behavior is slowly transferred to others. Most adults have many grooming partners. In a grooming pair, one partner mainly does, the other is mainly done to. But even the alpha will play either role. One individual will sit serenely while the other combs through its hair, rubs all its parts, and occasionally finds a parasite (a louse or a tick—maybe getting ripped on butyric acid), which it promptly eats. Sometimes the chimps hold hands the whole time. Jittery full-grown males will return to their mothers to be groomed and reassured. Males who become irritable with one another often hastily repair to mutual grooming to calm each other down. It may have been selected for long ago, as an improvement in chimp hygiene and public health, but grooming has now become a centrally important social activity, probably lowering testosterone and adrenaline titers.

  The closest human counterpart may be the back rub or the body massage, which have been raised to art forms in cultures as diverse as modern Japan and Sweden, Ottoman Turkey and Republican Rome—where, in characteristic human fashion, a specialized tool, the strigil, was employed to rub the back. Gentlemen in Restoration England idled away the hours by collectively combing their wigs. Where body lice are a problem, human parents carefully and routinely go through their children’s hair. The emotional power of being groomed by the alpha male is perhaps akin to the laying-on of hands by shamans, healing ministers, chiropractors, charismatic surgeons, and kings.

  Despite the importance of the male dominance hierarchy, it is by no means the only important chimp social structure, as the grooming pairs indicate. A mother and her children, or two grown siblings, have special, lifelong, mutually supportive bonds. A high-ranking son may be to a mother’s social advantage. There are also long-term relationships between unrelated individuals of the same sex that might certainly be called friendships. Largely outside the male hierarchy, there’s an intricate set of female bonds that often depend on the number and status of relatives and friends. These extrahierarchical alliances provide important means of mitigating or reordering a dominance hierarchy: If the alpha male is undefeated in one-on-one confrontation, an alliance of two or three lower-ranking males with supporting females may conceivably put him to flight. High-ranking males are known to establish alliances with promising younger males, perhaps co-opting them to prevent future putsches. Occasionally females will step in to defuse a tense encounter.

  Alliances are made and broken. Loyalties shift. There is courage and devotion, perfidy and betrayal. No dedication to liberty and equality is evident in chimpanzee politics, but machinery is purring to soften the more hard-hearted tyrannies: The focus is on the balance of power. Frans de Waal writes:

  The law of the jungle does not apply to chimpanzees. Their network of coalitions limits the rights of the strongest; everybody pulls strings.4

  In this complex, fluid social life great benefits accrue to those skilled in discerning the interests, hopes, fears, and feelings of others. The alliance strategy is opportunistic. Today’s allies may be tomorrow’s adversaries and vice versa. The only constant is ambition and fixity of purpose. Lord Palmerston, the nineteenth-century British Prime Minister—who described his nation’s foreign policy as no permanent national alliances, only permanent national interests—would have been right at home among the chimps.

  Males have special reasons to avoid permanent rivalries. In the hunt and in patrols into enemy territory, they rely on one another. Mistrust would endanger their effectiveness. They need alliances to work their way up the promotion ladder or to maintain themselves in power. So, while males are much more aggressive than females, they are also much more highly motivated toward reconciliation.

  When Calhoun crowded his rats together he found a wholesale change in their behavior, almost as if their collective strategy was now to kill off enough of themselves and to lower the birth rate enough that the population in the next generation would be reduced to manageable numbers. Given all the chimp propensities that we’ve chronicled (and the fact, described in the next chapter, that baboons can go into a murderou
s, annihilating group frenzy when packed together), you might expect that chimps behave badly when overcrowded, as in zoos. In close confines a male chimp cannot escape from an attack, cannot lead a female into the bushes away from the controlling gaze of the alpha male, cannot enjoy the excitement of the hunt or the patrol or contact with females from adjacent territories. You might expect frustration levels to rise, and hierarchical encounters now to involve less bluff and more real combat. If you’re not ready for a fight to the death, you’d better, you might think, find some way to mollify, appease, show deference, pay your respects, perform services, be useful—and genuflect at every step so the alpha harbors no possible misgivings about whether you know your place.

  Surprisingly, just the opposite is true. In zoo after zoo, males—and especially high-ranking males—exhibit a degree of measured restraint under crowded conditions that would be unthinkable if they were free. Imprisoned chimps are much more likely to share their food. Captivity somehow brings forth a more democratic spirit. When jammed together, chimps make an extra effort to get the social machinery humming. In this remarkable transformation it is the females who are the peacemakers. When, after a fight, two males are studiously ignoring one another—as if they were too proud to apologize or make up—it is often a female who jollies them along and gets them interacting. She clears blocked channels of communication.

  At the Arnhem colony in the Netherlands, every adult female was found to play a therapeutic role in communication and mediation among the petulant, rank-conscious, grudge-holding males. When real fights were about to break out and the males began to arm themselves with rocks, the females gently removed the weapons, prying their fingers open. If the males rearmed themselves, the females disarmed them again. In the resolution of disputes and the avoidance of conflict,* females led the way.5