The Naked Ape

by Desmond Morris

  When the pseudo-hunter is relaxing he goes to all-male ‘clubs’, from which the females are completely excluded. Younger males tend to form into all-male gangs, often ‘predatory’ in nature. Throughout the whole range of these organizations, from learned societies, social clubs, fraternities, trade unions, sports clubs, masonic groups, secret societies, right down to teenage gangs, there is a strong emotional feeling of male ‘togetherness’. Powerful group loyalties are involved. Badges, uniforms and other identification labels are worn. Initiation ceremonies are invariably carried out with new members. The unisexuality of these groupings must not be confused with homosexuality. They have basically nothing to do with sex. They are all primarily concerned with the male-to-male bond of the ancient co-operative hunting group. The important role they play in the lives of the adult males reveals the persistence of the basic, ancestral urges. If this were not so, the activities they promote could just as well be carried on without the elaborate segregation and ritual, and much of it could be done within the sphere of the family units. Females frequently resent the departure of their males to ‘join the boys’, reacting to it as though it signified some kind of family disloyalty. But they are wrong to do so. All they are witnessing is the modern expression of the age-old male-grouping hunting tendency of the species. It is just as basic as the male-female bonding of the naked ape and, indeed, evolved in close conjunction with it. It will always be with us, at least until there has been some new and major genetic change in our make-up.

  Although working has largely replaced hunting today, it has not completely eliminated the more primitive forms of expression of this basic urge. Even where there is no economic excuse for participating in the pursuit of animal prey, this activity still persists in a variety of forms. Big-game hunting, stag-hunting, fox-hunting, coursing, falconry, wild-fowling, angling and the hunting-play of children are all contemporary manifestations of the ancient hunting urge.

  It has been argued that the true motivation behind these present-day activities has more to do with the defeating of rivals than the hunting down of prey; that the desperate creature at bay represents the most hated member of our own species, the one we would so like to see in the same situation. There is undoubtedly an element of truth in this, at least for some individuals, but when these patterns of activity are viewed as a whole it is clear that it can provide only a partial explanation. The essence of ‘sport-hunting’ is that the prey should be given a fair chance of escaping. (If the prey is merely a substitute for a hated rival, then why give him any chance at all?) The whole procedure of sport-hunting involves a deliberately contrived inefficiency, a self-imposed handicap, on the part of the hunters. They could easily use machine-guns, or more deadly weapons, but that would not be ‘playing the game’ – the hunting game. It is the challenge that counts, the complexities of the chase and the subtle manœuvres that provide the rewards.

  One of the essential features of the hunt is that it is a tremendous gamble and so it is not surprising that gambling, in the many stylized forms it takes today, should have such a strong appeal for us. Like primitive hunting and sport-hunting, it is predominantly a male pursuit and, like them, it is surrounded by seriously observed social rules and rituals.

  An examination of our class structure reveals that both sport-hunting and gambling are more the concern of the lower and upper social classes than of the middle classes, and there is a very good reason for this if we accept them as expressions of a basic hunting drive. I pointed out earlier that work has become the major substitute for primitive hunting, but as such it has most benefited the middle classes. For the average lower-class male, the nature of the work he is required to do is poorly suited to the demands of the hunting drive. It is too repetitive, too predictable. It lacks the elements of challenge, luck and risk so essential to the hunting male. For this reason, lower-class males share with the (non-working) upper-class males a greater need to express their hunting urges than do the middle classes, the nature of whose work is much more suited to its role as a hunting substitute.

  Leaving hunting and turning now to the next act in the general feeding pattern, we come to the moment of the kill. This element can find a certain degree of expression in the substitute activities of work, sport-hunting and gambling. In sport-hunting the action of killing still occurs in its original form, but in working and gambling contexts it is transformed into moments of symbolic triumph that lack the violence of the physical act. The urge to kill prey is therefore considerably modified in our present-day way of life. It keeps reappearing with startling regularity in the playful (and not so playful) activities of young boys, but in the adult world it is subjected to powerful cultural suppression.

  Two exceptions to this suppression are (to some extent) condoned. One is the sport-hunting already mentioned, and the other is the spectacle of bullfighting. Although vast numbers of domesticated animals are slaughtered daily, their killing is normally concealed from the public gaze. With bullfighting the reverse is the case, huge crowds gathering to watch and experience by proxy the acts of violent prey-killing.

  Within the formal limits of blood-sports these activities are permitted to continue, but not without protest. Outside these spheres, all forms of cruelty to animals are forbidden and punished. This has not always been the case. A few hundred years ago the torture and killing of ‘prey’ was regularly staged as a public entertainment in Britain and many other countries. It has since been recognized that participation in violence of this kind is liable to blunt the sensitivities of the individuals concerned towards all forms of blood-letting. It therefore constitutes a potential source of danger in our complex and crowded societies, where territorial and dominance restrictions can build up to an almost unbearable degree, sometimes finding release in a flood of pent-up aggression of abnormal savagery.

  We have so far been dealing with the earlier stages of the feeding sequence and their ramifications. After hunting and killing, we come to the meal itself. As typical primates we ought to find ourselves munching away on small, non-stop snacks. But we are not typical primates. Our carnivorous evolution has modified the whole system. The typical carnivore gorges itself on large meals, well spaced out in time, and we clearly fall in with this pattern. The tendency persists even long after the disappearance of the original hunting pressures that demanded it. Today it would be quite easy for us to revert to our old primate ways if we had the inclination to do so. Despite this, we stick to well-defined feeding times, just as though we were still engaged in active prey-hunting. Few, if any, of the millions of naked apes alive today indulge in the typical, scattered feeding routine of the other primates. Even in conditions of plenty, we rarely eat more than three, or at the very most, four times a day. For many people, the pattern involves only one or two large daily meals. It could be argued that this is merely a case of cultural convenience, but there is little evidence to support this. It would be perfectly possible, given the complex organization of food supplies that we now enjoy, to devise an efficient system whereby all food was taken in small snacks, scattered throughout the day. Spreading feeding out in this way could be achieved without any undue loss of efficiency once the cultural pattern became adjusted to it, and it would eliminate the need for the major disruptions in other activities caused by the present ‘main meal’ system. But, because of our ancient predatory past, it would fail to satisfy our basic biological needs.

  It is also relevant to consider the question of why we heat our food and eat it while it is still hot. There are three alternative explanations. One is that it helps to simulate ‘prey temperature’. Although we no longer consume freshly killed meat, we nevertheless devour it at much the same temperature as other carnivore species. Their food is hot because it has not yet cooled down: ours is hot because we have re-heated it. Another interpretation is that we have such weak teeth that we are forced to ‘tenderize’ the meat by cooking it. But this does not explain why we should want to eat it while it is still hot, or why we sho
uld heat up many kinds of food that do not require ‘tenderizing’. The third explanation is that, by increasing the temperature of the food, we improve its flavour. By adding a complicated range of tasty subsidiaries to the main food objects, we can take this process still further. This relates back, not to our adopted carnivory, but to our more ancient primate past. The foods of typical primates have a much wider variety of flavours than those of carnivores. When a carnivore has gone through its complex sequence of hunting, killing and preparing its food, it behaves much more simply and crudely at the actual crunch. It gobbles; it bolts its food down. Monkeys and apes, on the other hand, are extremely sensitive to the subtleties of varying tastiness in their food morsels. They relish them and keep on moving from one flavour to another. Perhaps, when we heat and spice our meals, we are harking back to this earlier primate fastidiousness. Perhaps this is one way in which we resisted the move towards full-blooded carnivory.

  Having raised the question of flavour, there is a misunderstanding that should be cleared up concerning the way we receive these signals. How do we taste what we taste? The surface of the tongue is not smooth, but covered with small projections, called papillae, which carry the taste buds. We each possess approximately 10,000 of these taste buds, but in old age they deteriorate and decrease in number, hence the jaded palate of the elderly gastronome. Surprisingly, we can only respond to four basic tastes. They are: sour, salt, bitter and sweet. When a piece of food is placed on the tongue, we register the proportions of these four properties contained in it, and this blending gives the food its basic flavour. Different areas of the tongue react more strongly to one or other of the four tastes. The tip of the tongue is particularly responsive to salt and sweet, the sides of the tongue to sour and the back of the tongue to bitter. The tongue as a whole can also judge the texture and the temperature of the food, but beyond that it cannot go. All the more subtle and varied ‘flavours’ that we respond to so sensitively are not, in fact, tasted, but smelt. The odour of the food diffuses up into the nasal cavity, where the olfactory membrane is located. When we remark that a particular dish ‘tastes’ delicious, we are really saying that it tastes and smells delicious. Ironically, when we are suffering from a heavy head cold and our sense of smell is severely reduced, we say that our food is tasteless. In reality, we are tasting it as clearly as we ever did. It is its lack of odour that is worrying us.

  Having made this point, there is one aspect of our true tasting that requires special comment, and that is our undeniably prevalent ‘sweet-tooth’. This is something alien to the true carnivore, but typically primate-like. As the natural food of primates becomes riper and more suitable for consumption, it usually becomes sweeter, and monkeys and apes have a strong reaction to anything that is strongly endowed with this taste. Like other primates, we find it hard to resist ‘sweets’. Our ape ancestry expresses itself, despite our strong meat-eating tendency, in the seeking out of specially sweetened substances. We favour this basic taste more than the others. We have ‘sweet shops’, but no ‘sour shops’. Typically, when eating a full-scale meal, we end the often complex sequence of flavours with some sweet substance, so that this is the taste that lingers on afterwards. More significantly, when we occasionally take small, inter-meal snacks (and thereby revert, to a slight extent, to an ancient, primate scatter-feeding pattern), we nearly always choose primate-sweet food objects, such as candy, chocolate, ice-cream, or sugared drinks.

  So powerful is this tendency that it can lead us into difficulties. The point is that there are two elements in a food object that make it attractive to us: its nutritive value and its palatability. In nature, these two factors go hand in hand, but in artificially produced foodstuffs they can be separated, and this can be dangerous. Food objects that are nutritionally almost worthless can be made powerfully attractive simply by adding a large amount of artificial sweetener. If they appeal to our old primate weakness by tasting ‘super-sweet’, we will lap them up and so stuff ourselves with them that we have little room left for anything else: thus the balance of our diet can be upset. This applies especially in the case of growing children. In an earlier chapter I mentioned recent research which has shown that the preference for sweet and fruity odours falls off dramatically at puberty, when there is a shift in favour of flowery, oily and musky odours. The juvenile weakness for sweetness can be easily exploited, and frequently is.

  Adults face another danger. Because their food is in general made so tasty – so much more tasty than it would be in nature – its palatability value rises sharply, and eating responses are over-stimulated. The result is in many cases an unhealthily overweight condition. To counteract this, all kinds of bizarre ‘dieting’ regimes are invented. The ‘patients’ are told to eat this or that, cut down on this or on that, or to exercise in various ways. Unfortunately there is only one true answer to the problem: to eat less. It works like a charm, but since the subject remains surrounded by super-palatability signals, it is difficult for him, or her, to maintain this course of action for any length of time. The overweight individual is also bedevilled by a further complication. I mentioned earlier the phenomenon of ‘displacement activities’ – trivial, irrelevant actions performed as tension-relievers in moments of stress. As we saw, a very frequent and common form of displacement activity is ‘displacement feeding’. In tense moments we nibble small morsels of food or sip unneeded drinks. This may help to relax the tension in us, but it also helps us to put on weight, especially as the ‘trivial’ nature of the displacement feeding action usually means that we select for the purpose something sweet. If practised repeatedly over a long period, this leads to the well-known condition of ‘fat anxiety’, and we can witness the gradual emergence of the familiar, rounded contours of guilt-edged insecurity. For such a person, slimming routines will work only if accompanied by other behavioural changes that reduce the initial state of tension. The role of chewing-gum deserves a mention in this context. This substance appears to have developed exclusively as a displacement feeding device. It provides the necessary tension-relieving ‘occupational’ element, without contributing damagingly to the overall food intake.

  Turning now to the variety of foodstuffs eaten by a present-day group of naked apes, we find that the range is extensive. By and large, primates tend to have a wider range of food objects in their diets than carnivores. The latter have become food specialists, whereas the former are opportunists. Careful field studies of a wild population of Japanese macaque monkeys, for example, have revealed that they consume as many as 119 species of plants, in the shape of buds, shoots, leaves, fruits, roots and barks, not to mention a wide variety of spiders, beetles, butterflies, ants and eggs. A typical carnivore’s diet is more nutritious, but also much more monotonous.

  When we became killers, we had the best of both worlds. We added meat with a high nutritive value to our diet, but we did not abandon our old primate omnivory. During recent times – that is, during the last few thousand years – food-obtaining techniques have improved considerably, but the basic position remains the same. As far as we can tell, the earliest agricultural systems were of a kind that can loosely be described as ‘mixed farming’. The domestication of animals and plants advanced side by side. Even today, with our now immensely powerful dominance over our zoological and botanical environments, we still keep both strings to our bow. What has stopped us from swinging further in one direction or the other? The answer seems to be that, with vastly increasing population densities, an all-out reliance on meat would give rise to difficulties in terms of quantity, whereas an exclusive dependence on crops would be dangerous in terms of quality.

  It could be argued that, since our primate ancestors had to make do without a major meat component in their diets, we should be able to do the same. We were driven to become flesh-eaters only by environmental circumstances, and now that we have the environment under control, with elaborately cultivated crops at our disposal, we might be expected to return to our ancient primate feeding
patterns. In essence, this is the vegetarian (or, as one cult calls itself, fruitarian) creed, but it has had remarkably little success. The urge to eat meat appears to have become too deep-seated. Given the opportunity to devour flesh, we are loth to relinquish the pattern. In this connection, it is significant that vegetarians seldom explain their chosen diet simply by stating that they prefer it to any other. On the contrary, they construct an elaborate justification for it, involving all kinds of medical inaccuracies and philosophical inconsistencies.

  Those individuals who are vegetarian by choice ensure a balanced diet by utilizing a wide variety of plant substances, like the typical primates. But for some communities a predominantly meatless diet has become a grim practical necessity rather than an ethical minority-preference. With advancing crop-cultivation techniques and the concentration on a very few staple cereals, a kind of low-grade efficiency has proliferated in certain cultures. The large-scale agricultural operations have permitted the growth of big populations, but their dependency on a few basic cereals has led to serious malnutrition. Such people may breed in large numbers, but they produce poor physical specimens. They survive, but only just. In the same way that abuse of culturally developed weapons can lead to aggressive disaster, abuse of culturally developed feeding techniques can lead to nutritional disaster. Societies that have lost the essential food balance in this way may be able to survive, but they will have to overcome the widespread ill-effects of deficiencies in proteins, minerals and vitamins if they are to progress and develop qualitatively. In all the healthiest and most go-ahead societies today, the meat-and-plant diet balance is well maintained and, despite the dramatic changes that have occurred in the methods of obtaining the nutritional supplies, the progressive naked ape of today is still feeding on much the same basic diet as his ancient hunting ancestors. Once again, the transformation is more apparent than real.