Field data support this inference. In Lomako Forest, where bonobos are studied without human food provisioning, sexual activity increases during the sharing of meat or when a group of bonobos excitedly enters a fruiting tree. And at Wamba, sexual activity in all partner combinations is common when there is a potential for competition, such as when the investigators provide sugar cane. In short, there is no relevant discrepancy between how bonobos behave in captivity and in the field.
For example, at the zoo bonobos sometimes resolve competition through food-for-sex exchanges. Similarly, Suehisa Kuroda saw in Wamba that "a young female approached a male, who was eating sugar cane. They copulated in short order, whereupon she took one of the two canes held by him and left." In another case, "a young female persistently presented to a male possessor, who ignored her at first, but then copulated with her and shared his sugar cane."98
Such transactions provide, I believe, a fascinating window on the bonobo's past. Most likely, the species started out similarly to the other apes, that is, with male dominance. In the course of evolution, sexual receptivity may have been extended, resulting in longer-lasting genital swellings that helped females bargain for food controlled by males. Over time, this tactic became more and more restricted to young females. Fully adult females tend to be of equal or higher status than males, and simply claim food whenever they want.
Female bonobos establish close ties amongst themselves, and mothers exert such influence on the lives of their sons, including fully grown ones, that Kano has called mothers the "core" of bonobo society. For example, females meddle in fights among males, and in doing so determine which males will be high-ranking. Although I certainly don't buy the feminist myth of hominid ancestors free from gender biases, bonobo society does come close to what the writer Marilyn French, in Beyond Power, labeled a "matricentry."
New Kid on the Block
Chimpanzee experts are spoiled by the quirk of history that made the species they study known long before the bonobo. They have become so used to dropping the catchphrase "man's closest relative" in connection to their subjects that they have a hard time getting used to the modifier "one of man's closest relatives" in light of the bonobo, which is equally close to us. Moreover, the bonobo's sexiness has, after a period of discomfort, turned these primates into media stars. They are not merely sharing the limelight, they have begun to steal it!99
At a more profound level, the bonobo's female-centered society is inconvenient for those who are invested in male-biased evolutionary scenarios. Whereas the chimpanzee perfectly fits this line of thinking, the peaceful bonobo is urging a reconsideration of the underlying assumptions. As a result, the handful of scientists familiar with these apes have been put in the position of defending their observations against skeptics who mostly have never laid eyes on a bonobo. Since they cannot make the new kid on the block go away, they question how special it really is. As a result, we are seeing the implausible spectacle of serious scholars denying conspicuous bonobo features and coming up with imaginative alternative explanations. They try to tell us that certain kinds of sex are not sex, that female dominance might be male chivalry, and that female bonding could be mere tolerance.'°°
As one of the few scientists familiar with both bonobos and chimpanzees, and a firm believer in the profoundness of their differences, I had a special question for Furuichi and his wife, Chic Hashimoto, when I met with them at a Yokohama bar over a giant tuna head from which we picked meat with chopsticks. Due to the Congo's political upheavals, the couple has given up on bonobo fieldwork, and now studies chimpanzees in Uganda. Here I had two of the very few people in the world who intimately know both ape species in the field. "Do you feel the differences between bonobos and chimpanzees have been exaggerated?" I asked. They almost jumped off their stools, exclaiming how shocked they had been by chimpanzees. They had seen with their own eyes what Tratz and Heck called the "demoniacal Urkraft" of the chimpanzee, its stormy temperament, its brutal competitiveness, but also its male bonding and unique political complexity. Before going to Uganda, they themselves had suspected that perhaps the literature had painted too much of a black and white picture, but they were now convinced that bonobos and chimpanzees lived in truly different worlds.
Kuroda, who also has experience with both species in the field, told me a telling detail about how bonobos flee from strange people. Whereas chimpanzees scatter in all directions, bonobos stay together as a group when they escape unwanted attention. In the chimpanzee, even mother and young may take separate routes, which Kuroda, who started out on bonobos, found shocking, since these apes would never do such a thing. It is also known that bonobos call each other so as to congregate before they build nests for the night, whereas chimpanzees usually sleep on their own. The two species' temperaments seem radically different, with chimpanzees being independent-minded, and bonobos highly sociable and solidary.
As soon as camera crews are able to enter the Congo again, and have the guts to film bonobos the way they are, people will understand that everything being said about these apes is no exaggeration. They are not the product of some overactive sexual imagination, or of wishful thinking. That they delight feminists, the gay community, and pacifists should not be held against them. If one of our closest relatives fails to fit the prevailing views about aggressive males and passive females, one possibility to consider is that the prevailing views are mistaken.
Either that, or there is something wrong with those males.
"The ape would try new ideas, make new patterns, but only very slowly. Old patterns were repeated and only slightly altered as time went by. The war between wildness and security, between strangeness and familiarity, these were being worked out by the ape, at its simple level, just as human artists were working them out at their highly complex and advanced level."
Desmond Morris,
hen advanced paintings and engravings were discovered on rocks in South Africa, the first reaction of Western experts was that these creations could not possibly have come from the indigenous San, or Bushmen, as this would mean that the San had discovered the power of art on their own. The actual artists must have come from the outside.
In line with this view, Henri Breuil, the great French expert on Upper Paleolithic art, named a Namibian painted figure The White Lady of Brandberg because he could tell her racial origin and felt she must have been Mediterranean. Others believed that prehistoric Europeans, navigating around Africa in search of hunting grounds, had produced the paintings. But after closer examination, the evidence is now overwhelming that the San were responsible for the rock art, that Breuil's white lady was neither Caucasian nor female, and that some of the art is older than the famous Lascaux cave paintings in France.102
The reaction to the San rock art is emblematic. It reminds one of the reception of the first European cave paintings. In 1879, a little girl and her father looked at the ceiling of a low cave in Altimira, Spain, and saw dozens of bison, horses, boars, deer, and a wolf in the flickering light of their oil lamp. The father, an amateur archeologist, reported the find, but did not live to see it accepted as genuine prehistoric art, which happened only decades later. Initially, the cave paintings were dismissed as the product of modern artists. It was just not conceivable that primitive minds could have produced images of such elegance, realism, and artistic beauty.103
Underlying the skepticism surrounding these and other early finds is the idea that it is only recently, and only in very few human populations, that cultural sophistication has reached a level permitting artistic images. Art is supposed to set civilized man apart from the rest. It is regarded as even more characteristically human than language and culture, a capacity we are extremely reluctant to grant even to primitive folk. If the trait is that exclusive, animals obviously deserve no mention at all.
Yet biologists feel that animals are no strangers to aesthetic expression. The New Guinean bowerbird's nest decorations are as good an example as any. The thatched nests can be so l
arge and well-constructed that they once were mistaken for the huts of timid people, who never showed up. The nests often have a doorway with carefully arranged colorful objects, such as berries, flowers, or iridescent beetle wings. The male who built the bower keeps flying in new ornaments, shifting everything around with a critical eye, fussing over the arrangement, moving back to look at the whole from a distant anglelike a human painter with his painting-and then continuing the rearrangement. He is very sensitive to the fading of his flowers, replacing them with fresh ones as soon as necessary. Young males build crude "practice" bowers, tearing them down, then starting over again, until the construction holds up as it should. They also frequently visit the completed bowers of adult males in the neighborhood and see how the ornaments are laid out. There are ample learning opportunities here, and it has been noted that bower decorations differ in color and arrangement from region to region, which suggests culturally transmitted styles.1°4
Is this art? One could counter that it isn't: howerbird males are genetically programmed to engage in this activity just to attract females. Yet, while it is true that females select mates on nest quality and their equivalent of a stamp collection, the argument is not nearly as good as it sounds. To contrast these birds with our species requires that one demonstrates that human art does not rest on an inborn aesthetic sense and is produced purely for its own sake, not to impress anyone else. Both are unlikely. In fact, Geoffrey Miller argues in a recent book that impressing others, especially members of the opposite sex, may be the whole point of human art! 105
What if our artistic impulse is ancient, antedating modern humanity, and perhaps even our species? What if it rests on a delight in self-created visual effects and a penchant for certain color combinations, shapes, and visual equilibriums that we share with other animals? Would admission in any of these areas diminish the significance of and pleasure derived from human art? Isn't it possible that our basic distinctions in art, our musical scales, and our preference for symmetrical compositions, go deeper than culture, and relate to basic features of our perceptual systems?
What better way to connect humans and animals culturally than investigate the common ground in the visual arts and music? There obviously remain vast differences, but from an evolutionary perspective it would be strange indeed if the beauty that we recognize in nature, and that has inspired so many human artists over the ages, would have an impact only on our own species. Our eyes and ears are very similar to those of many other life forms, and until very recently we dwelled in the same kind of environment. The ancestral environment must have shaped our senses, making us seek certain impressions more than others. This argument has regularly been made in architecture, such as the claim that the famous Court of Lions in the Alhambra, in Granada, evokes a universal emotional response because standing inside the columned arcade, looking at the lighter part in the center, harks back to walks through the forest looking out at open areas. It is easy to agree, therefore, with the following recommendation by Nicholas Humphrey: "If I were asked for a prescription for where architects and planners should go to learn their trade, it would be this: Go out to nature and learn from experience what natural structures men find beautiful, because it is among those structures that men's aesthetic sensitivity evolved."lob
Can't Stand Schonberg
Everyone with an ear for music appreciates the moving, pleasing quality of birdsong, especially that of species with variable, long-phrased repertoires such as the nightingale or blackbird (a European relative of the American robin). In the time before radio and television, this was the sort of "music" most often heard in the evening, and was treasured by poets and romantic lovers alike. As the twelfth-century Marie de France most famously put it in her poem Laiistic, anyone who hasn't heard the nightingale sing doesn't know the joys of the world.
Conversely, animals can be quite sensitive to human music. There are stories of dogs who hide under the couch for piano works by atonal composers but not for those by, say, Mozart. One music teacher told me that her dog would heave an audible sigh of relief if she stopped playing complex, fast-moving pieces by Franz Liszt and proceeded to something calmer. And there are reports of cows that produce more milk listening to Beethoven (although, if this is true, shouldn't one hear more classical music on farms?).
In the laboratory, sparrows have been tested on their preference for composers. Out of four birds, two liked to sit on a perch that turned on Bach rather than perches associated with the twelve-tone music of Schonberg, or white noise. The choices of the other two birds were less clear. Did I detect some hidden glee when the investigators dryly concluded that Schonberg may possess some "aversive stimulus properties"? 107
Birds listen as carefully to sounds as any musician. They have to, because they learn from each other. Many birds are not born with the song they sing: the symphonies they offer us for free in forests and meadows are cultural. White-crowned sparrows, for example, develop their normal song only when they have been exposed early in life to the sounds of an adult of their species. Many songbirds have dialects-differences in song structure from one population to another. One theory about this is that if a female can tell from a male's song that he is a local boy, she may prefer him as a mate, as he may be genetically adapted to regional conditions. Given the variability in song from location to location it is hard to maintain that birdsong is instinctive in the usual sense. There is room for creativity and modification. Some individuals act as star performers, setting new trends in their region.ios
Inasmuch as birdsong is shaped by oral tradition, this is a potential area of crossover between animal and human culture. A composer may be inspired by what he or she hears in nature, and translate a bird's vocal innovations into a human cultural medium. At a recent meeting, the late Luis Baptista of the California Academy of Sciences reviewed the evidence in a delightful lecture, Why Birdsong Is Sometimes Like Music, full of comparisons between the West's great composers and the smaller feathered ones studied by Baptista and his ornithological colleagues.109
That composers have often found inspiration in nature is reflected in the titles of their works, such as Der Wachtelschlag (The Quail Song)-a title used by three different composers: Beethoven, Schubert, and Haydn-as well as Vivaldi's Il Gardinellino (The Goldfinch) and Mozart's Spatzenmesse (Sparrow Mass). Bird sounds can be discovered in many works, such as chickadees in Bruckner, pigeons in Britten, and nightingales in Respighi. The most popular bird may be the cuckoo, the unmistakable call of which can be heard in many works, from Beethoven's Pastorale to J. S. Bach's fugue Thema all' Imitatio Gallina Cucci, which pitches a cuckoo in counterpoint against a chicken, and lets the first win.
Birdsong often follows a sonatalike structure in that it starts out with a theme, followed by variations on it, after which the original theme is recapitulated. The similarity is no accident given that both people and birds get bored by repetitions, and hence need to break the monotony without losing sight of the unifying theme in their compositions. Successful themes are handed down for many generations. Thus, the rondo in Beethoven's Violin Concerto in D Major, which premiered in 1806, features a melody that was independently recognized as the song of a blackbird by both a British ornithologist, in 1953, and a German concert pianist, in 1980. This could mean that Beethoven was inspired by a blackbird-invented melody that these songbirds have kept going, through transgenerational imitation, for over a century.
But the most striking and amusing case is that of a Mozart composition that has baffled musicologists ever since it appeared in 1787.
Mozart's Little Fool
Music historians have found it hard to accept that one of the most idolized Western composers, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, could have arranged a solemn ceremony, with veiled, hymn-singing mourners, and a special poem by the composer himself, for the burial of a mere bird. Could it be that, since Mozart's father had died in the same week, the funeral was related to this family tragedy instead? This conjecture hardly explains, though,
why on this sad occasion, on June 4, 1787, the great composer's recital began with these lines:
Anyone familiar with the European starling, Sturnus vulgaris, knows how apt this description is (the German word for "fool" in Mozart's poem, Narr, also means "jester" or "clown"). The same ordinary bird is now common in the United States because a different kind of fools released over one hundred of them in New York's Central Park in the 1890s as part of an effort to introduce the entire avian cast of the Shakespearean theater. With several hundred million starlings now blackening the skies across the North American continent, the amount of agricultural havoc created by this wellintended decision has been immeasurable.
Starlings are clowns, and no one knows this better than the people who have raised these overactive birds at home. They imitate all sorts of sounds made by other animals, people, and objects, such as telephones, rattling keys, and clinking dishes. In the households of academics, they have been known to pick up phrases, such as "basic research" and "I think you're right," which they use at inopportune moments, resulting in amusing commentaries. One bird had a custom of landing on a shoulder while uttering "Basic research, it's true, I guess that's right." Another bird, squirming while being held for treatment of its feet, screeched "I have a question!"
Mozart's starling whistled a tune on May 27th, 1784, that thrilled Mozart (top). With a minor modification, the final movement in Mozart's pianoconcerto No. 17 features the same theme. (From Nottebohm, 1880).
The Ape And The Sushi Master Reflections Of A Primatologist Page 12