Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

by Carl Sagan

  In the last of eighteen short paragraphs in his Periplus, Hanno describes finding, just before turning back, an island in an African lake,

  full of wild men. By far the majority of them were women with hairy bodies. The interpreters called them “gorillas.”

  The males escaped by climbing precipices and hurling stones. But the females were not so lucky.

  We captured three women … who bit and scratched … and did not want to follow. So we killed them and flayed them and took their skins to Carthage.

  Modern scholars take these beseiged and mutilated beings to be either what we today call gorillas, or chimpanzees. One of the details, the throwing of stones by the males, suggests to us that they were chimps. The Periplus is the earliest firm historical account we have of a first contact between apes arid humans.3

  ——

  The ancient Mayan authors of the Popol Vuh considered monkeys to be the product of the last botched experiment conducted by the gods before they finally got it right and managed to create us. The gods meant well, but they were fallible, imperfect artisans. Humans are hard to make. Many peoples in Africa, Central and South America, and the Indian subcontinent thought of apes and monkeys as beings with some deep connection to humans—aspirant humans, perhaps, or failed humans, demoted for some grave transgression against divine law, or voluntary exiles from the self-discipline demanded by civilization.

  In ancient Greece and Rome the similarity of apes or monkeys with humans was well-known—indeed, it was stressed by Aristotle* and Galen. But this led to no speculations about common ancestry. The gods who had made humans were also in the habit of changing themselves into animals to rape or seduce young women: Like the centaurs and the Minotaur, the offspring of these unions were chimeras, part beast, part human. Still, no ape chimeras are prominent in the myths of Greece and Rome.

  In India and ancient Egypt, though, there were monkey-headed gods, and in the latter large numbers of mummified baboons—indicating that they were cherished if not worshipped. A monkey apotheosis would have been unthinkable in the post-classical West—in part because the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic religion came of age where nonhuman primates were rare or absent, but mainly because the worship of animals (for example, the Golden Calf of the Israelites) was singled out as an abomination: They were pedaling away from animism as fast as they could. Apes were not widely available for examination in Europe until about the sixteenth century; the so-called Barbary ape of North Africa and Gibraltar—which is what Aristotle and Galen apparently described—is actually a monkey, a macaque.

  Without exposure to the beasts most like men, it was difficult to draw the connection between beasts and men. It was easier by far to imagine a separate creation of each species, with the less vivid similarities between us and other animals (the suckling of the young, say, or five toes on each foot) understood as some trademark idiosyncracy of the Creator. The ape was as far below man, it was asserted, as man was below God. So, when, after the Crusades, and especially beginning in the seventeenth century, the West came to know monkeys and apes better, it was with a sense of embarrassment, shame, a nervous snigger—perhaps to disguise the shock of recognition at the family resemblance.

  The Darwinian idea that monkeys and apes are our closest relatives brought the discomfort to the conscious level. You can still see the unease today in the conventional associations with the word “ape”: to copy slavishly, to be outsized and brutal. To “go ape” is to revert, to become wild, untamed. When we handle something idly, in an exploratory way, we’re “monkeying around.” To “make a monkey” out of someone is to humiliate him. A “little monkey” is a mischievous or playful child. A “monkeyshine” is a prank. To “go bananas” is to lose control—reflecting the fact that monkeys and apes, who indeed love bananas, are not subject to the same social restraints that we are. In Christian Europe in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, monkeys and apes were emblematic of extreme ugliness, of a doomed craving for the status of humans, of ill-gotten wealth, of a vengeful disposition, of lust and foolishness and sloth.5 They were accessories—because of their susceptibility to temptation—in the “Fall of Man.” For their sins, it was widely held, apes and monkeys deserved to be subjugated by humans. We seem to have weighed these beings down with a heavy burden of symbols, metaphors, allegories, and projections of our own fears about ourselves.

  ——

  Before the outside world knew anything of his long effort to understand evolution, Darwin wrote telegraphically in his 1838 “M” notebook: “Origin of man now proved … He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than [the philosopher John] Locke.”6 But what does it mean to understand a baboon?

  One of the earliest scientific studies of the chimpanzee in its natural African habitat was made by Thomas N. Savage, a Boston physician. Writing in early Victorian times, he concluded:

  They exhibit a remarkable degree of intelligence in their habits, and, on the part of the mother, much affection for their young … [But] they are very filthy in their habits … It is a tradition with the natives generally here, that they were once members of their own tribe: that for their depraved habits they were expelled from all human society, and, that through an obstinate indulgence of their vile propensities, they have degenerated into their present state and organisation.7

  Something was bothering Thomas N. Savage, M.D. “Filthy,” “depraved,” “vile,” and “degenerate” are terms of abuse, not scientific description. What was Savage’s problem? Sex. Chimpanzees have an obsessive, unself-conscious preoccupation with sex that seems to have been more than Savage could bear. Their zesty promiscuity may include dozens of seemingly indiscriminate heterosexual copulations a day, routine close mutual genital inspections, and what at first looks very much like rampant male homosexuality. This was a time when proper young ladies were abjured not to inquire too closely into the stamens and pistils—“the private parts”—of flowers; the renowned critic John Ruskin would later harumph, “With these obscene processes and prurient apparitions, the gentle and happy scholar of flowers has nothing to do.”8 How was a proper Bostonian physician to describe what he had witnessed among the chimpanzees?

  And if he did describe it, even obliquely, did he not run a certain risk—that his readers would conclude he approved what he was chronicling? Or more than “approved.” What had drawn him to chimpanzees in the first place? Why did he insist on writing about them? Were there no worthier matters deserving of his attention? Perhaps, he felt obliged to ensure that even a casual reader would note the great distance separating Thomas Savage from the subjects of his study.*

  ——

  William Congreve was the leading playwright of the English comedy of manners around the turn of the eighteenth century. The monarchy had been restored after a bloody struggle with the Puritan religious schismatics who gave their name to rigidity on sexual morality. Each age is repelled by the excesses of the last, so this was a time of moral permissiveness, at least among the dominant elite. Their sigh of relief was almost audible. But Congreve was not their apologist. His ironical and satirical wit was directed at the pretensions, affectations, hypocrisies, and cynicisms of his age—but especially at the prevailing sexual mores. Here, for example, are three fragments of ruling-class dialogue from his The Way of the World:

  [O]ne makes lovers as fast as one pleases, and they live as long as one pleases, and they die as soon as one pleases; and then, if one pleases, one makes more.

  You should have just so much disgust for your husband as may be sufficient to make you relish your lover.

  I say that a man may as soon make a friend by his wit, or a fortune by his honesty, as win a woman with plain dealing and sincerity.9

  Bearing in mind Congreve’s role as daring social critic of sexual manners, now consider this excerpt from a 1695 letter he wrote to the critic John Dennis:

  I can never care for seeing things that force me to entertain low thoughts of my Nature. I don’t know how it is wi
th others, but I confess freely to you, I could never look long upon a monkey without very Mortifying Reflections; tho I never heard any thing to the Contrary, why that Creature is not Originally of a Distinct Species.10

  Somehow, the sexual imbroglios of upper-class twits that he chronicled did not generate as many Mortifying Reflections as a visit to the zoo. Plays such as Congreve’s were themselves being criticized as breaking down “the Distinctions between Man and Beast. Goats and Monkeys, if they could speak, would express their Brutality in such Language as This.”11 Monkeys were beginning to bother Europeans. And Congreve put his finger on the problem: What does it say about us if monkeys are our close relatives?

  From the earliest encounters that history records between apes and men, to parents hurrying their children past the monkey cages before awkward questions are posed, we’ve felt an unease—and the unease has been greater the more puritanical the observer. “The body of an ape is ridiculous … by reason of an indecent likeness and imitation of man,” wrote the cleric Edward Topsell in his 1607 work Historie of Foure-Footed Beasts. Charles Gore, “a man of rock-like faith” and a successor of Samuel Wilberforce as Anglican Bishop of Oxford, was a conflicted habitué of the London Zoo: “I always return an agnostic. I cannot comprehend how God can fit those curious beasts into his moral order.” He once shook his finger at a chimpanzee and rebuked it aloud, in the presence of an attentive small crowd of which he was wholly unaware: “When I contemplate you, you turn me into a complete atheist, because I cannot possibly believe that there is a Divine Being that could create anything so monstrous.”12 If, say, ducks or rabbits with a penchant for sexual excess were under review, people would not have been nearly so bothered. But it’s impossible to look at a monkey or ape without ruefully recognizing something of ourselves.

  Simians have facial expressions, social organization, a system of mutually understood calls, and a style of intelligence that’s familiar. They have opposable thumbs and five fingers on each hand which they use as we do. Some walk upright on two legs, at least occasionally. They are awfully, uncomfortably, like us. Might their mores suggest alternative sexual arrangements that might be erosive of the social fabric?* And other ruminations about human affairs might be roused by close attention to monkeys and apes—on the prevalence of coercion and violence, for example, or about public sanctions on sexual intimidation, rape, and incest. These are weighty and sensitive matters. The behavior of monkeys and apes—particularly the ones that look most like us—is an awkward business. Better to put it aside, better to ignore it, better to study something else. Many people would rather not know.

  ——

  Carl Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century biologist, founded the science of taxonomy—the goal of which is to classify every organism on Earth.14 He set himself the task of recording the similarities and differences of all the plants and animals then known, and arranging them all into a web—or, better, a tree—of relatedness. It was he who introduced many elements of the now-standard classification scheme: species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, and kingdom, moving from less to more inclusive categories. Each of these categories is called a “taxon” (plural, “taxa”). So we humans, for example, are of the animal kingdom, the vertebrate phylum, the class of mammals, the order of primates, the family of Hominidae, the genus Homo, and the species Homo sapiens. In other words, we’re animals, not plants or fungi or bacteria; we have backbones, so we’re not invertebrates such as worms or clams; we have breasts to supply milk to the young, so we’re not reptiles or birds; we’re primates, not rats or gazelles or raccoons; and we’re Hominidae, not orangutans or vervet monkeys or lemurs. We are of the genus Homo, in which taxon there is but one species (although once there were others—maybe many others). This is how we classify ourselves today. And it’s almost the same as what Linnaeus proposed.

  After accruing vast experience with his new discipline of taxonomy, classifying thousands of beasts and vegetables, Linnaeus contemplated the status of an animal of special interest—himself. Then he reconsidered. By his standard criteria, Linnaeus would have placed human beings and chimpanzees in the same genus.* His scientific integrity urged him to do so. But he well understood what an abomination, how scandalous such a step would have been judged by the Swedish Lutheran Church—indeed, by every religious establishment of which he knew. So Linnaeus trimmed his sails, made a social compromise, and placed us in a genus by ourselves—although he outraged many by declaring us, with the apes and monkeys, a member of the same order.

  It’s hard to fault him. Like Copernicus, Galileo, and Descartes, he was about as brave as his age would allow. Many naturalists placed humans in a separate order; by Darwin’s time this would become the conventional wisdom. Many clerics (and some naturalists) placed us in a separate kingdom. The evidence may not have warranted it, but isolating humans in their own genus, their separate first-class compartment, was a popular step, reassuring to human vanity. In 1788, in a reflective and undefensive mood, Linnaeus wrote:

  I demand of you, and of the whole world, that you show me a generic character … by which to distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself most assuredly know of none. I wish somebody would indicate one to me. But, if I had called man an ape, or vice versa, I would have fallen under the ban of all the ecclesiastics. It may be that as a naturalist I ought to have done so.16

  One of the scientific names for the common chimpanzee then was Pan satyrus. Pan was an ancient Greek deity, part man, part goat, associated with lust and fertility. A satyr was a closely associated chimera—at first represented as a man with a horse’s tail and ears and an erect penis. Clearly the rampant sexuality of chimps was the defining characteristic in this early naming of the species. The modern classification is Pan troglodytes, troglodytes being mythical creatures who live in caves and beneath the Earth—a much less appropriate designation, since chimps reside exclusively on (and slightly above) the Earth. (The Barbary apes of North Africa do sometimes live in caves; the only other primates known routinely to have lived in caves are humans.) Linnaeus had mentioned a Homo troglodytes, but it’s unclear whether he had ape or human in mind. Or something inbetween.

  A systematic comparison of the anatomies of apes and humans was performed during the opening salvos of the Darwinian Revolution by T. H. Huxley. He described his research program in these words, notable among other respects for their extraterrestrial perspective:

  [L]et us endeavour for a moment to disconnect our thinking selves from the mask of humanity; let us imagine ourselves scientific Saturnians, if you will, fairly acquainted with such animals as now inhabit the Earth, and employed in discussing the relations they bear to a new and singular “erect and featherless biped,” which some enterprising traveller, overcoming the difficulties of space and gravitation, has brought from that distant planet for our inspection, well preserved, may be, in a cask of rum. We should all, at once, agree upon placing him among the mammalian vertebrates; and his lower jaw, his molars, and his brain, would leave no room for doubting the systematic position of the new genus among those mammals, whose young are nourished during gestation by means of a placenta, or what are called the “placental mammals” …

  There would remain then, but one order for comparison, that of the Apes (using that word in its broadest sense), and the question for discussion would narrow itself to this—is Man so different from any of these Apes that he must form an order by himself? Or does he differ less from them than they differ from one another, and hence must take his place in the same order with them?

  Being happily free from all real, or imaginary, personal interest in the results of the inquiry thus set afoot, we should proceed to weigh the arguments on one side and on the other, with as much judicial calmness as if the question related to a new Opossum. We should endeavour to ascertain, without seeking either to magnify or diminish them, all the characters by which our new Mammal differed from the Apes; and if we found that these were of less structural value, than those which distingu
ish certain members of the Ape order from others universally admitted to be of the same order, we should undoubtedly place the newly discovered tellurian [terrestrial] genus with them.

  I now proceed to detail the facts which seem to me to leave us no choice but to adopt the last mentioned course.17

  Huxley then compares the skeletal and brain anatomies of apes and humans. The “manlike apes” (chimps, gorillas, orangutans, gibbons, and the gibbon-like siamangs—the first three called “greater” and the last two “lesser” apes) all have the same number of teeth as humans; all have hands with thumbs; none has a tail; all arose in the Old World. The skeletal anatomies of chimps and humans are strikingly similar. And “the difference between the brains of the Chimpanzee and of Man,” he concluded,18 “is almost insignificant.”

  From these data, Huxley then drew the straightforward conclusion that contemporary apes and humans are close relatives, sharing a recent ape-like common ancestor. The conclusion scandalized Victorian England. The outraged reaction of the wife of the Anglican Bishop of Worcester was typical: “Descended from apes! My dear, let us hope that it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known.”19 Here it is again: the fear that knowledge of the true nature of our ancestors might unravel the social fabric.