The Human Zoo: A Zoologist's Study of the Urban Animal

by Desmond Morris

  Luckily the long hunting apprenticeship had developed ingenuity and a mutual-aid system. The human hunters, it is true, were still innately competitive and self-assertive, like their monkey ancestors, but their competitiveness had become forcibly tempered by an increasingly basic urge to co-operate. It had been their only hope of succeeding in their rivalry with the long-established, sharp-clawed, professional killers of the carnivore world, such as the big cats. The human hunters had evolved their co-operativeness alongside their intelligence and their exploratory nature, and the combination had proved effective and deadly. They learned quickly, remembered well, and were adept at bringing together separate elements of their past learning to solve new problems. If this quality had been helpful to them in the early days, when on their arduous hunting trips, it was even more essential to them now, nearer to home, as they stood on the threshold of a new and vastly more complex form of social life.

  The lands around the eastern end of the Mediterranean were the natural homes of two vital plants: wild wheat and wild barley. Also found in this region were wild goats, wild sheep, wild cattle and wild pigs. The human hunter/ gatherers who settled in this area had already domesticated the dog, but it was used primarily as a hunting companion and watchdog, rather than as a direct source of food. True farming began with the cultivation of the two plants, wheat and barley. It was followed soon after by the domestication, first, of goats and sheep, and then, a little later, of cattle and pigs. In all probability, the animals were first attracted by the cultivated crops, came to eat, and stayed to be bred and eaten themselves.

  It is no accident that the other two regions of the earth which, later on, saw the birth of independent ancient civilizations (southern Asia and central America) were also places where the hunter/gatherers found wild plants suitable for cultivation: rice in Asia and maize in America.

  So successful were these Late Stone Age cultivations that, from that day to this, the plants and animals that were domesticated then have remained the major food sources of all large-scale agricultural operations. The great new advance in farming has been mechanical rather than biological. But it was what started out as the mere left-overs of early farming that were to have the truly shattering impact on our species.

  Retrospectively it is easy to explain. Before the arrival of farming, everyone who was going to eat had to do their share of food-finding. Virtually the whole tribe was involved. But when the forward-thinking brains that had planned and schemed hunting manoeuvres turned their attention to the problems of organizing the cultivation of crops, the irrigation of land and the breeding of captive animals, they achieved two things. Such was their success that they created, for the first time, not only a constant food supply, but also a regular and reliable food surplus. The creation of this surplus was the key that was to unlock the gateway to civilization. At last, the human tribe could support more members than were required to find food. The tribe could not only become bigger, but it could free some of its people for other tasks: not part-time tasks, fitted in around the priority demands of food-finding, but full-time activities that could flourish in their own right. An age of specialization was born.

  From these small beginnings grew the first towns.

  I have said that it is easy to explain, but all this means is that it is not difficult for us, in looking back, to pick out the vital factor that led on to the next great step in the human story. It does not, of course, mean that it was an easy step to take at the time. It is true that the human hunter/gatherer was a magnificent animal, full of untapped potentialities and capabilities. The fact that we are here today is proof enough. But he had evolved as a tribal hunter, not as a patient, sedentary farmer. It is also true that he had a far-seeing brain, capable of planning a hunt and understanding the seasonal changes in his environment. But to be a successful farmer, he had to stretch his far-seeingness beyond anything he had previously experienced. The tactics of hunting had to become the strategy of fanning. This accomplished, he had to push his brain even farther to contend with the added social complexities that were to follow his new-found affluence, as villages grew into towns.

  It is important to realize this when talking of an ‘urban revolution’. The use of this phrase gives the impression that towns and cities began to spring up all over the place in an overnight rush towards an impressive new social life. But it was not like that. The old ways died hard and slowly. Indeed, in many parts of the world they are still with us today. Numerous contemporary cultures are still operating at virtually Neolithic farming levels, and in certain regions, such as the Kalahari Desert, Northern Australia, and the Arctic, we can still observe Palaeolithic-style communities of hunter/gatherers.

  The first urban developments, the first towns and cities, grew, not as a sudden rash on the skin of prehistoric society, but as a few tiny, isolated spots. They appeared at sites in south-west Asia as dramatic exceptions to the general rule. By present-day standards they were very small and the pattern spread slowly, very slowly. Each was based on a highly localized organization, intimately connected with and bound up in the surrounding farmlands.

  At first there was little trade or inter-action between one urban centre and the others. This was to be the next great advance, and it took time. The psychological barrier to such a step was obviously the loss of local identity. It was not so much a case of ‘the tribe that lost its head’, as the human head refusing to lose its tribe. The species had evolved as a tribal animal and the basic characteristic of a tribe is that it operates on a localized, inter-personal basis. To abandon this fundamental social pattern, so typical of the ancient human condition, was going to go against the grain. But it was the grain, in another sense, so efficiently harvested and transported, that was forcing the pace. As agriculture advanced and the urban elite, liberated from the labours of production, began to concentrate their brain-power on other, newer problems, it was inevitable that there would eventually emerge an urban network, a hierarchically organized interconnection between neighbouring towns and cities.

  The oldest known town arose at Jericho more than 8,000 years ago, but the first fully urban civilization developed farther east, across the Syrian desert in Sumer. There, between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago, the first empire was born, and the ‘pre' was taken out of prehistory with the invention of writing. Inter-city co-ordination developed, leaders became administrators, professions became established, metalwork and transport advanced, beasts of burden (as distinct from food animals) were domesticated and monumental architecture arose.

  By our standards the Sumerian cities were small, with populations ranging from 7,000 to no more than 20,000. Nevertheless, our simple tribesman had already come a long way. He had become a citizen, a super-tribesman, and the key difference was that in a super-tribe he no longer knew personally each member of his community. It was this change, the shift from the personal to the impersonal society, that was going to cause the human animal its greatest agonies in the millennia ahead. As a species we were not biologically equipped to cope with a mass of strangers masquerading as members of our tribe. It was something we had to learn to do, but it was not easy. As we shall see later, we are still fighting against it today in all kinds of hidden ways—and some that are not so hidden.

  As a result of the artificiality of the inflation of human social life to the super-tribal level, it became necessary to introduce more elaborate forms of controls to hold the bulging communities together. The enormous material benefits of super-tribal life had to be paid for in discipline. In the ancient civilizations which began to develop around the Mediterranean, in Egypt, Greece and Rome and elsewhere, administration and law grew heavier and more complex alongside the increasingly flourishing technologies and arts.

  It was a slow process. The magnificence of the remnants of these civilizations that we marvel at today tends to make us think of them as comprising vast populations, but this was not so. In heads per super-tribe, the growth was gradual. As late as 600 B.C., the largest city,
Babylon, contained no more than 80,000 people. Classical Athens had a citizen population of only 20,000, and only a quarter of these were members of the true urban elite. The total population of the whole city state, including foreign merchants, slaves, and rural as well as urban residents, has been estimated at no more than 70,000 to 100,000. To put this into perspective, it is slightly smaller than present-day university towns such as Oxford or Cambridge. The great modern metropolises, of course, bear no comparison: there are over a hundred today boasting populations exceeding one million, with the biggest exceeding ten million. Modem Athens itself contains no fewer than 1,850,000 people.

  If they were to continue to grow in splendour, the ancient urban states could no longer rely on local produce. They had to augment their supplies in one of two ways: by trade or by conquest. Rome did both, but put the emphasis on conquest and carried it out with such devastating administrative and military efficiency that it was able to create the greatest city the world had seen, containing a population approaching half a million, and setting a pattern that was to echo widely down the centuries that followed. These echoes exist today, not only in the brain-straining toil of the organizers, manipulators and creative talents, but also in the increasingly idle, sensation-seeking urban elite, who have grown so numerous that they can easily turn sour with shattering effect and must be kept amused at all costs. In the sophisticated city-dweller of Imperial Rome, we can already see a prototype of the present-day super-tribesman.

  In unfolding our urban tale we have, with ancient Rome, come to a stage where the human community has grown so big and is so densely packed that, zoologically speaking, we have already arrived at the modern condition. It is true that, during the centuries that followed, the plot thickened, but it was essentially the same plot. The crowds became denser, the elite became eliter, the technologies became more technical. The frustrations and stresses of city life became greater. Super-tribal clashes became bloodier. There were too many people and that meant there were people to spare, people to waste. As human relationships, lost in the crowd, became ever more impersonal, so man’s inhumanity to man increased to horrible proportions. However, as I have said before, an impersonal relationship is not a biologically human one, so this is not surprising. What is surprising is that the bloated super-tribes have survived at all and, what is more, survived so well. This is not something we should accept simply because we are sitting here in the twentieth century, it is something we should marvel at. It is an astonishing testimony to our incredible ingenuity, tenacity and plasticity as a species. How on earth did we manage it?

  All we had to go on, as animals, was a set of biological characteristics evolved during our long hunting apprenticeship. The answer must he in the nature of these characteristics and the way we have been able to exploit and manipulate them without distorting them as badly as we (superficially) seem to have done. We must take a closer look at them.

  Bearing in mind our monkey ancestry, the social organization of surviving monkey species can provide us with some revealing clues. The existence of powerful, dominant individuals, lording it over the rest of the group, is a widespread phenomenon amongst higher primates. The weaker members of the group accept their subordinate roles. They do not rush off into the undergrowth and set up on their own. There is strength and security in numbers. When these numbers become too great, then, of course, a splinter group will form and depart, but isolated individual monkeys are abnormalities. The groups move about together and keep together at all times. This allegiance is not merely the result of an enforced tyranny on the part of the leaders, the dominant males. Despots they may be, but they also play another role, that of guardians and protectors. If there is a threat to the group from without, such as an attack from a hungry predator, it is they who are most active in defence. In the face of an external challenge, the top males must get together to meet it, their internal squabbles forgotten. But on other occasions active co-operation within the group is at a minimum.

  Returning to the human animals, we can see that this basic system—social co-operation when facing outward, social competition when facing inward—also applies to us, although our early human ancestors were forced to shift the balance somewhat. Their gargantuan struggle to convert from fruit-eaters to hunters required much greater, more active, internal co-operation. The external world, in addition to providing occasional panics, now threw an almost non-stop challenge in the face of the emerging hunter. The result was a basic shift towards mutual aid, towards sharing and combining resources. This does not mean that early man began to move as one, like a shoal of fish; life was too complex for that. Competition and leadership remained, helping to provide impetus and reduce indecisiveness, but despotic authority was severely curtailed. A delicate balance was achieved and, as we have already seen, one that was to prove immensely successful, enabling the early human hunters to spread over most of the earth’s surface, with only the minimum of technology to help them on their way.

  What happened to this delicate balance as the tiny tribes blossomed into giant super-tribes? With the loss of the person-to-person tribal pattern, the competitive/co-operative pendulum began to swing dangerously back and forth, and it has been oscillating damagingly ever since. Because the subordinate members of the super-tribes became impersonal crowds, the most violent swings of the pendulum have been towards the domineering, competitive side. The over-grown urban groups rapidly and repeatedly fell prey to exaggerated forms of tyranny, despotism and dictatorship. The super-tribes gave rise to super-leaders, exercising powers that make the old monkey tyrants look positively benign. They also gave rise to super-subordinates in the form of slaves, who suffered subservience of a kind more extreme than anything even the most lowly of monkeys would have known.

  It took more than a single despot to dominate a supertribe in this way. Even with deadly new technologies— weapons, dungeons, tortures— to aid him in forcibly maintaining conditions of widespread subjugation, he also required a massive following if he was to succeed in holding the biological pendulum so far to one side. This was possible because the followers, like the leaders, were infected by the impersonality of the super-tribal condition. They calmed their co-operative consciences to some extent by the device of setting up sub-groups, or pseudo-tribes, within the main body of the super-tribe. Each individual established, personal relationships of the old, biological type with a small, tribesized group of social or professional companions. Within that group he could satisfy his basic urges towards mutual aid and sharing. Other sub-groups—the slave class, for example— could then be looked upon more comfortably as outsiders beyond his protection. The social ‘double standard’ was born. The insidious strength of these new sub-divisions lay in the fact that they even made it possible for personal relationships to be carried on in an impersonal way. Although a subordinate — a slave, a servant, or a serf— might be personally known to a master, the fact that he had been neatly placed into another social category meant that he could be treated as badly as one of the impersonal mob.

  It is only a partial truth to say that power corrupts. Extreme subjugation can corrupt equally effectively. When the bio-social pendulum swings away from active cooperation towards tyranny, the whole society becomes corrupt. It may make great material strides. It may shift 4,883,000 tons of stone to build a pyramid; but with its deformed social structure its days are numbered. You can dominate just so much, just so long and just so many, but even within the hot-house atmosphere of a super-tribe, there is a limit. If, when that limit is reached, the bio-social pendulum tilts gently back to its balanced mid-point, the society can count itself lucky. If, as is more likely, it swings wildly back and forth, the blood will flow on a scale our primitive hunting ancestor would never have dreamt of.

  It is the miracle of civilized survival that the human cooperative urge reasserts itself so strongly and so repeatedly. There is so much working against it and yet it keeps on coming back. We like to think of this as the conquest of bestial wea
knesses by the powers of intellectual altruism, as if ethics and morality were some kind of modern invention. If this were really true, it is doubtful if we would be here today to proclaim it. If we did not carry in us the basic biological urge to co-operate with our fellow men, we would never have survived as a species. If our hunting ancestors had really been ruthless, greedy tyrants, loaded with ‘original sin', the human success story would have petered out long ago. The only reason why we are always having the doctrine of original sin instilled into us, in one form or another, is that the artificial conditions of the super-tribe keep on working against our biological altruism, and it needs all the help it can get.

  I am aware that there are some authorities who will disagree violently with what I have just said. They see men as naturally inclined to be weak, greedy and wicked, requiring stem codes of imposed control to make them strong, kind and good. But when they deride the concept of the ‘noble savage’ they confuse the issue. They point out that there was nothing noble about ignorance or superstition, and in that respect they are right. But it is only part of the story. The other part concerns the early hunter’s conduct towards his companions. Here the situation must have been different. Compassion, kindness, mutual assistance, a fundamental urge to co-operate within the tribe must have been the pattern for the early groups of men to survive in their precarious environment. It was only when the tribes expanded into impersonal super-tribes that the ancient pattern of conduct came under pressure and began to break down. Only then did artificial laws and codes of discipline have to be imposed to correct the balance. If these had been imposed to a degree to match the new pressures, all would have been well; but in the early civilizations men were novices at achieving this delicate balance. They failed repeatedly, with lethal results. We are more expert now, but the system has never been perfected because, as the super-tribes have continued to swell, the problem has re-set itself.