Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

by Carl Sagan

  Put aside the facts that chimps eat meat, that most monkeys and apes have no harems, and—a fact known even in 1932—that in many cultures humans are not “usually” monogamous; and compare Zuckerman’s assessment with Toshisada Nishida’s, in a much later overview of twenty-five years of research on chimpanzees in the Mahale mountains:

  [T]he following social behavioral patterns are known to be present in both the chimpanzee and our own species: strong tendency to avoid incest, long-lasting mother-offspring relationship, male philopatry [males remaining in the group they are born into], strong antagonism among groups, cooperation among males, development of reciprocal altruism, triadic awareness [for example, sexual triangles], alliance fickleness strategy, revenge system, sex difference in political behavior …46

  Much of this may be genetically, as well as culturally, determined, but “socially” there do seem to be some “obvious comparisons” between man and ape.

  ——

  Consciousness and self-awareness are, in the West, widely esteemed as the essence of being human (although the absence of self-awareness is considered a state of grace and perfection in the East); the origin of consciousness is imagined to be an unfathomable mystery, or—not so different—the consequence of the insertion of an immaterial soul into each human being, but into no other animal, at the moment of conception. Consciousness may not be so mysterious a trait, though, that supernatural intervention is needed to explain it. If its essence is a lucid awareness of the distinction between the inside of the organism and the outside, between you and everyone else, then, as we’ve argued, most microorganisms are to this degree conscious and aware; and then the origin of consciousness on our planet dates back more than 3 billion years. There were vast numbers of microscopic creatures then, buffeted by sea swells and ocean currents, reveling in the sunlight, each with a rudimentary consciousness—perhaps only a microconsciousness, or even a nano- or picoconsciousness.47

  Every cell in a healthy body can make the distinction between itself and others, and those that cannot, that suffer from auto-immune diseases, quickly kill themselves or fall prey to disease microorganisms. But maybe you’re thinking that a cell distinguishing itself from another cell (in your body or in the primeval sea) is not what is generally meant by consciousness or self-awareness, that even for exceptionally unreflective humans there’s more to it than that. Yes. As we’ve said, only the most rudimentary kind of consciousness can be imagined in the early history of life on Earth. Of course, there’s been substantial evolution since then. Do we know—it might be a very hard thing to know—whether any other animals have our kind of self-awareness?

  This is often thought to be a key facet of our humanity, especially because of what else it makes possible:

  The attribute of self-awareness, which involves man’s capacity to discriminate himself as an object in a world of objects other than himself, is … central to our understanding of the prerequisites of man’s social and cultural mode of adjustment … A human social order implies a mode of existence that has meaning for the individual at the level of self-awareness. A human social order, for example, is always a moral order … It is man’s capacity for and development of self-awareness that makes such unconscious psychological mechanisms as repression, rationalization and so on of adaptive importance for the individual.48

  A fish, a cat, a dog, or a bird catching sight of itself in the mirror apparently understands the image only as another member of the same species. If unhabituated to mirror images, male animals may attempt to intimidate the reflection; it must be sensed as a rival male. The image intimidates back and the animal may flee. Eventually, it accommodates to the silent, odorless, and harmless image and learns to ignore it. By mirror reflection criteria, these animals don’t seem very smart. It is said that human children must usually be about two years old before they grasp that their mirror image is not some other child with a talent for imitation. In recognizing what a reflection is, monkeys also are like fish, cats, dogs, birds, and human infants. They don’t get it. But some apes are like us.

  In 1977 the psychologist Gordon Gallup published an article entitled “Self-Recognition in Primates.”49 When chimpanzees born in the wild were confronted with a full-length mirror, at first—like other animals—they thought the reflection was someone else. But within a few days they had it figured out. Then, they’d use the mirror to preen, and to examine inaccessible parts of themselves, looking over their shoulders to view their backs, for example. Gallup then anesthetized the chimps and painted them red—in places that they could see only in the mirror. Upon regaining consciousness and resuming the pleasures of self-examination in the mirrors, they quickly discovered the red marks. Did they reach out to the ape in the glass? Instead, they groped their own bodies, touched the painted areas repeatedly, and then smelled their fingers. They trebled the time they spent each day examining their mirror images.*

  Among the other great apes, Gallup found mirror self-awareness in orangs, but not in gorillas. Later, he may have found it in dolphins. We are conscious, he proposes, when we know that we exist, and have a mind when we monitor our own mental states. By these criteria, Gallup concludes, chimps and orangs, at least, are conscious and have minds.50

  “As to what concerns fidelity, there is no animal in the world so treacherous as man,” said Montaigne.51 But male fireflies skillfully interpose their own blinks so as to make the courting message of their rivals disagreeable to the females. Some chimp females vampirishly stalk young mothers of their group, waiting for the chance to steal and eat their newborns. Many primates seek surreptitious matings when the alpha’s attention is elsewhere. Few of the male alliances rippling through the dominance hierarchy persist beyond their utility. Deception in the social relations of animals, and even self-deception in animals, is an emerging and productive topic in biology; whole books are written about it.52

  Chimps sometimes lie. They also sometimes try to outwit others who are lying. This fact surely affords us a glimpse inside their minds:

  An especially telling example is the duplicity displayed by chimpanzees trying to keep the locality of cached food to themselves, and the cunning of others at beating the bluff … You cannot—logically cannot—tell lies unintentionally; even the idea of self-deception involves the intentional model, one part of the self trying to put it over on the rest. The dissembling chimpanzee appears to be acting on the understanding of what the signs he gives will mean to others, and hence intentionally.53

  And yet it is not so long ago that a modern philosopher, among many others, was saying,

  It would be senseless to attribute to an animal a memory that distinguished the order of events in the past, and it would be senseless to attribute to it an expectation of an order of events in the future. It does not have the concepts of order, or any concepts at all.54

  How could he know that?

  The chimpanzee’s interior monologue is doubtless not up to the standard of the average philosopher’s, but that they have some notion of themselves, what they look like, what their needs are, their past experiences, future expectations, and how they relate to others—enough for the purposes of a “social order”—seems beyond doubt.

  ——

  “Language is our Rubicon,” declaimed the famous nineteenth-century linguist Max Müller, “and no brute will dare to cross it.” Language permits widely dispersed humans to communicate with one another. It allows us to sample the wisdom of the past and time-binds the generations. It is an essential tool in helping us to sharpen our mental acuity, to think more clearly. It is an unsurpassed aid to memory. With good reason we prize it. Long before the invention of writing, language played a major role in human success. This is the main reason that Huxley could reassuringly conclude, “Our reverence for the nobility of manhood will not be lessened by the knowledge that Man is, in substance and structure, one with the brutes.”55 But does this mean that other animals must lack language, even simple language, even the capability for lan
guage? We are struck by Müller’s military, defensive metaphor, and the possibility he seems to raise that language is within the grasp of “brutes” and that only timidity restrains them.

  A long tradition of similar confident assertions denying language to the beasts dates from the start of the European Enlightenment, perhaps beginning with a 1649 letter by René Descartes:

  The principal argument, to my mind, which may convince us that the brutes are devoid of reason, is that … it has never yet been observed that any animal has arrived at such a degree of perfection as to make use of a true language; that is to say, as to be able to indicate to us by the voice, or by other signs, anything which could be referred to thought alone, rather than to a movement of mere nature; for the word is the sole sign and the only certain mark of the presence of thought hidden and wrapped up in the body; now all men, the most stupid and the most foolish, those even who are deprived of the organs of speech, make use of signs, whereas the brutes never do anything of the kind; which may be taken for the true distinction between man and brute.56

  That chimps and bonobos can engage in a rich flow of gestural and lexigraphic signs is beyond doubt. We have glimpsed the vigorous scientific debate about their ability to use language. The nervousness of some scientists about claims of chimp language is evident in many ways—including repeatedly changing the rules after the game has begun. For instance, some scientists denied that Ameslan-signing chimps have language because of an apparent absence of negations or interrogatives. As soon as the chimps began objecting and asking questions, the critics discovered some other aspect of language that the chimps presumably did not have while humans did, and that now became the sine qua non of language. To a surprising extent, scientists and philosophers have merely asserted, sometimes with extraordinary vehemence, that apes cannot use language, and then dismissed evidence to the contrary because it contradicted their assumption.58 Darwin’s view, in contrast, was that some animals have the power of language, “at least in a rude and incipient degree,” and that if “certain powers, such as self-consciousness, abstraction, etc., are peculiar to man,” they are “mainly the result of the continued use of a highly developed language.”

  There is controversy over how many meaningful and non-redundant words chimps can routinely put into a sentence. But there is no dispute that chimps (and bonobos) can manipulate hundreds of signs or ideograms taught to them by humans; and that they use these words to communicate their wishes. As we’ve discussed, the words can stand for objects, actions, people, other animals, or the chimp itself. There are common and proper nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs. Chimps and bonobos can request, and therefore are clearly thinking about, things or actions not now present—food, for example, or grooming. There is evidence that—like the Ameslan-literate Lucy and the lexigram-literate Kanzi—they can put words together in new combinations to make a novel kind of sense. Some of them invent and tend to abide by at least a few simple grammatical rules. They can label and categorize inanimate objects, animals, and people using not just the things themselves, but arbitrary words representing the things. They are capable of abstraction. They seem sometimes to use language and gesture to lie and deceive, and to reflect an elementary understanding of cause and effect. They can be self-reflexive, not just in action, as with their mirror images, but also in language, as when a chimp named Elizabeth was cutting an artificial apple with a knife and signed, in a special token language in which she was fluent, “Elizabeth apple cut.”

  They know at best only about 10% the number of words in “basic English” or other minimal vocabularies adequate for everyday human life. This difference has been exaggerated—as by one distinguished linguist who argues that a finite number of human words can be combined to generate an “infinite” number of sentences, and an “infinite” number of communicable subjects, while chimps are stuck in their finitude.59 In fact, of course, the entire range of human words and ideas is, as for apes, resolutely finite. The laboratory linguistic accomplishments of chimps and bonobos are in addition to their own repertoire of signals—in gesture, sound, and smell—of which we understand, probably, very little. “The word,” the “use of signs” which Descartes denied to “brutes,” is plainly present in chimps and bonobos.

  No ape has ever shown linguistic abilities approaching those of a normal child entering kindergarten. Nevertheless they seem to have a clear-cut, although elementary, ability to use language. Many of us would grant that a child of two or three who has a vocabulary and verbal dexterity comparable to that of the most accomplished chimps or bonobos—no matter how glaring their deficits in grammar and syntax—has language.60 It has been conventional wisdom in the social sciences that culture presupposes language and language presupposes a sense of self. Whether this is true or not, chimps and bonobos evidently have, at least in a rudimentary form, all three: consciousness, language, and culture. They may be much less repressed than we are and not as bright, but they, also, can think.

  Most of us have a memory like this: You’re lying in your crib, having awakened from your nap. You cry for your mother, at first tentatively, but when no one comes, more emphatically. Panic mounts. Where is she? Why doesn’t she come? you think, or something along those lines—although not in words, because your verbal consciousness is still almost wholly undeveloped. She enters the room smiling, she reaches in and picks you up, you hear her musical voice, you smell her perfume—and how your heart soars! These powerful emotions are preverbal—as are much of our adult anticipations, passions, forebodings, and fears. Our feelings are present before they can be parsed into neat grammatical packages, to be dealt with and subdued. In those dimly remembered feelings and associations, we may glimpse something of the consciousness and emotional lives of chimps, bonobos and our immediate prehuman ancestors.

  * Many of them would not have included the word “other,” and even today there are those who bristle at being called—even by scientists speaking generically and without affect—“animals.”

  * On July 14, 1858, Friedrich Engels wrote in a letter to Karl Marx: “Nothing discredits modern bourgeois development so much as the fact that it has not yet succeeded in getting beyond economic forms of the animal world.”

  * For example, water buffalo in Southeast Asia, which are routinely castrated by crushing their testicles between two rocks.32

  * Watching themselves in the mirror wearing hats is also a wildly popular and apparently gripping experience.

  Chapter 20

  THE ANIMAL WITHIN

  [T]he human brain is an imperfect instrument

  built up through long geological periods. Some

  of its levels of operation are more primitive and

  archaic than others. Our heads, modern man has

  learned, may contain weird and irrational

  shadows out of the subhuman past—shadows

  that under stress can sometimes elongate

  and fall darkly across the threshold of our

  rational lives. Man has lost the faith of the

  eighteenth century in the enlightening power of

  pure reason, for he has come to know that he is

  not a consistently reasoning animal. We have

  frightened ourselves with our own black nature

  and instead of thinking “We are men now, not

  beasts, and must live like men,” we have eyed

  each other with wary suspicion and whispered

  in our hearts, “We will trust no one. Man is

  evil. Man is an animal. He has come from the

  dark wood and the caves.”

  LOREN EISELEY

  Darwin’s Century1

  We have now brought our story—our fragmentary effort to reconstruct some of the entries in the orphan’s file, to cast a little light into the shadows—to the threshold of the appearance of humans on Earth. It is time to take stock.

  Many of the protective ditches, moats, and minefields painstakingly dug to separate us from the other anim
als have now been bridged or flanked. Those driven to preserve for us some unique, unambiguous, defining characteristic are tempted to shift the definitions once again and erect a final line of defense around our thoughts. If chimpanzee and bonobo language is limited, we cannot tell much about what they think or feel, what meaning, if any, they give to their lives. They have authored, at least so far, no autobiographies, reflective essays, confessions, self-analyses, or philosophical memoirs. If we can choose particular ideas and feelings to define ourselves, no chimp can contradict us. For example, we might point to our knowledge that all of us will someday die, or that sex is the cause of babies—matters widely understood among humans, although sometimes denied. Perhaps no ape has ever glimpsed these important truths. Perhaps some have. We do not know.2 But standing alone on such homiletic pinnacles is a hollow victory for the human species. These occasional insights are minor matters compared to the vaunted distinctions of humanity that have crumbled into dust as we have learned more about the other animals. At so fine a level of detail, the motives of those who would define us by this or that idea seem suspect, the human chauvinism manifest.

  To compare humans with other animals in regard to behavior amenable to observation is just; but unfavorable comparisons on the basis of first-person accounts emanating from within the animals themselves, their reports of their thoughts and insights, are unfair if no channel of communication into their internal lives has yet been opened. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Were we better able to enter into the mind of the ape, might we not find much more there than we guess?—a point made almost three centuries ago by Henry St. John, the first Viscount Bolingbroke: