Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

by Carl Sagan

  Chimps also drop branches on intruders and sop up drinking water with leaves. While they cannot be described as fastidious or obsessively hygienic, chimps are known to use leaves as toilet paper and handkerchiefs, and twigs as toothbrushes. They employ sticks for digging up roots, for investigating animals in burrows and knotholes, and—like a croupier at a gaming table—for raking in otherwise inaccessible fruit. If they were able to manufacture more complex tools, they certainly would have the intelligence and dexterity to use them: In zoos, chimps try to steal the keys from the keeper’s pocket. When successful, they often manage to open the lock. Like us, they can sometimes use their intelligence to escape from bondage.

  Male chimps like to throw missiles—whatever is handy, generally sticks and stones. (Like the inmates of college fraternity houses, they also occasionally throw food.) Females are much less interested in missiles. Chimps would throw stones at the visitors who gawk at them in the traditional kind of zoo—if they had stones. As it is, all they have is feces. When wild chimps are presented with a fairly realistic mechanical leopard, after a reassurance frenzy of screams, hugs, and mutual mountings, they find appropriate clubs and beat the effigy to death—or at least until they knock the stuffing out. Or they’ll pelt it with stones. (In the same circumstance, baboons will furiously attack the leopard, but without a thought of using clubs. Baboons just don’t know about tools.)

  Chimps have stunned or killed by throwing stones. The directionality of their throwing is good. Where they’re deficient is in range: In tense confrontations with prey or hostile peers, thrown rocks hit their targets only a few percent of the time. Adolescent boys don’t do much better under comparable conditions. But even when inaccurate, a hail of stones can be off-putting.

  A distinction needs to be made between tool using and tool making. Many scientists have conceded tool use to other animals, and, following Benjamin Franklin, defined humans as the sole tool-making animal; where tools are manufactured, it is suggested, language cannot be far behind.16 But the chimpanzee termite fishery industry makes it clear that chimps, with considerable forethought, both make and use tools. Chimps also have a rudimentary stone technology, although, as far as we know, they don’t manufacture stone tools in the wild. In captivity, though, Kanzi—the linguistically talented bonobo—has, imitating human models, hit stones together to produce sharp flakes, which he then uses to cut a string so he can open a box which is filled with food. (This is a causality sequence at least five steps long.) As long as it’s sharp enough to cut the string, Kanzi will generally settle for the first crude stone knife he flakes off. But the thicker the rope he must cut, the larger and sharper the knife he makes.17

  Evidence of chimpanzee talent to combine objects purposefully to make tools has actually been with us for decades:

  Between 1913 and 1917, Wolfgang Kohler conducted observations and experiments on the intelligence of chimpanzees at a field station in North Africa. In one study a male chimpanzee, Sultan, was led into a room where a banana had been tied to a string and suspended from the ceiling in a corner. A large wooden box had also been placed in the center of the room, open side up. Sultan first tried to reach the fruit by jumping, but this quickly proved futile. He then “paced restlessly up and down, suddenly stood still in front of the box, seized it, tipped it … straight towards the objective … began to climb up it … and springing upwards with all his force, tore down the banana.” A few days later Sultan was taken into a room with a much higher ceiling, where again there was a suspended banana, as well as a wooden box and a stick. After failing to get the banana with the stick alone, Sultan sat down “with an air of fatigue … gazed about him, and scratched his head.” He then stared at the boxes, suddenly leaped up, seized a box and a stick, pushed the box underneath the banana, reached up with the stick and knocked the fruit down. Kohler was struck with the apparently thoughtful period that preceded Sultan’s solution, as well as with his sudden and directed performance. Such “insightful” behavior apparently contrasted with other forms of learning, which develop gradually and depend on reinforcement. 18

  It’s not hard to imagine an especially insightful chimp or bonobo wondering if there weren’t some way to make a stone flake cut better or a projectile go farther.

  Since the progress of human technology is a continuum, to pick a particular milestone—the domestication of fire, say, or the invention of the bow and arrow, agriculture, canals, metallurgy, cities, books, steam, electricity, nuclear weapons, or spaceflight—as the criterion of our humanity would be not just arbitrary, but would exclude from humanity every one of our ancestors who lived before the selected invention or discovery was made. There is no particular technology that makes us human; at best it could only be technology in general, or a propensity for technology. But that we share with others.

  Like us, nonhuman primates are not all the same. They vary in focus from individual to individual and group to group. Some, like Imo, are technological geniuses. Others, like the hierarchy-besotted macaque males, are hopelessly old-fashioned and stuck in their ways. One chimp population pounds nuts, another does not. Some probe for termites, others only for ants. Some use grass stalks and vines to coax the insects out, others sticks and twigs. Females preferentially use hammers and anvils, males preferentially throw stones. None of them, so far as we know, has ever used a stick to dig out a nutritious root or tuber, although it ought to be possible and adaptive. Some individuals find technology uncongenial or intellectually too taxing and never use it, despite the obvious advantages accruing to other members of their group who are comfortable with technology. Some large groups have no technology at all. “I’m embarrassed to say,” says an observer of a community of Ugandan chimps, “that the Kibale chimpanzees appear as the country bumpkins of the chimp world.” He goes on to speculate that life is too easy and food too plentiful at Kibale for the challenge of deprivation to elicit the response of technology.19

  Chimps are smart. They carry accurate mental maps of their territory in their heads. They seem to know the seasonal availability of plant foods and will congregate in some peripheral province of their territory to harvest a small stand of ripening fruits or vegetables. They have rudimentary culture, medicine, and technology. They have a startling capacity for simple language. They can plan for the future. Think again of the sensory and cognitive skills necessary to succeed in chimpanzee social life. You must recognize dozens of faces and their expressions. You must remember what each of these individuals has done to you or for you in the past. You must understand the foibles, weaknesses, ambitions of potential allies and rivals. You must be quick on your feet. You must be very flexible. But if you have all this, there’s probably a great deal else about the world that, sooner or later, you can figure out and change.

  ——

  How thoroughly the chimps and bonobos have erased the list of purported human distinctions!—self-awareness, language, ideas and their association, reason, trade, play, choice, courage, love and altruism, laughter, concealed ovulation, kissing, face-to-face sex, female orgasm, division of labor, cannibalism, art, music, politics, and featherless bipedalism, besides tool using, tool making, and much else. Philosophers and scientists confidently offer up traits said to be uniquely human, and the apes casually knock them down—toppling the pretension that humans constitute some sort of biological aristocracy among the beings of Earth. Instead, we are more like the nouveau riche, incompletely accommodated to our recent exalted state, insecure about who we are, and trying to put as much distance as possible between us and our humble origins. It’s as if our nearest relatives, by their very existence, refute all our explanations and justifications. So as counterweights to human arrogance and pride, it is good for us that there are still apes on Earth.

  Much of this chimp and bonobo behavior was discovered only recently. Doubtless they have other talents that have so far eluded us. We humans are biased observers, with a vested interest in the answer. The cure for this disease is more data.
But the study of primate behavior, both in the laboratory and in the wild, is by and large poorly and grudgingly funded.

  If we insist on absolute rather than relative differences, we do not, so far at least, discover any distinguishing characteristic of our species. Shouldn’t we expect, especially with our close relatives, that the differences will be of degree and not of kind? Isn’t this the lesson of evolution? If we require that we uniquely possess tools, culture, language, trade, art, dance, music, religion, or conceptual intelligence, we will not understand who we are. If, on the other hand, we are willing to admit that what distinguishes us from the other animals is more of one propensity and less of another, then we may make some progress. Then, if we wish, we can take pride in the fuller flowering of primate aptitudes that has taken place in our species.

  The more an animal weighs, the more of it there is that its brain must control, and so—within certain limits—the bigger its brain needs to be. This is true between species, although not between individual members of a given species. A species with a much bigger brain for its body weight—especially in its higher brain centers—has a good chance of being, on some level, smarter. Indeed, for comparable body weights, humans tend to have bigger brains than other primates; primates than other mammals; mammals than birds; birds than fish; and fish than reptiles.20 There is some scatter in the data, but the correlation is clear. It corresponds pretty well to the commonly accepted (by humans, of course) rank order of animal intelligence. The earliest mammals had significantly larger brains than their reptilian contemporaries of comparable body weight; and the earliest primates were similiarly well-endowed compared to other mammals. We come from big-brained stock.

  Adult humans, who weigh only a little more than adult chimps, nevertheless have brains three to four times more massive. A human infant a few months old already has a larger brain than a grown-up chimpanzee.21 It seems very likely that we’re significantly smarter than the chimps because we have a significantly larger brain—despite the comparable body weights. For a factor of three to four increase in brain weight, the brain size (its circumference, say) must increase by about 50%. But the human brain isn’t entirely a proportional scaling up of a chimp brain. Despite what Huxley found, there is a little bit of brain architecture—not much, but some—that humans have and the other primates at least mainly don’t. Significantly, some of it seems to be related to speech.

  Some parts of the brain are proportionally much larger in humans than in other primates: The cerebral cortex in general, responsible for thinking, is proportionally much larger in humans than in chimps (or in our non-human primate ancestors); so is the cerebellum, in charge of keeping us steady on our (two) feet.22 The frontal lobes are far more prominent in humans than in chimps; they’re thought to play an important role in foreseeing the future consequences of present action, in planning ahead.*

  Still, purported distinctions in brain anatomy must be treated with caution: There are many primates not yet studied with sufficient care, and there have been so many erroneous claims. For example, in humans different information is stored in, and different abilities controlled by, the two hemispheres of the cerebral cortex—a surprising finding that emerges from patients whose bundle of neural fibers connecting the two brain hemispheres has been cut.23 This asymmetry, called “lateralization,” is connected with language, and, arguably, with tool use.24 So, of course, the conceit arose that only the brains of humans are lateralized.25 Then songbirds were found to have their songs stored almost exclusively in only one hemisphere of their brains,26 and lateralization was discovered in chimps that had learned language.27 In any case, the qualitative differences between chimp and human brains, if any, are few and subtle.

  So is that all there is to it? Give the chimps a bigger brain and the power of articulate speech, maybe take away some testosterone, cancel the ads for ovulation, burden them with some more inhibitions, give them a shave and a haircut, stand them up on their hind legs, and get them out of the trees at night? Would they then be indistinguishable from the earliest humans?

  The possibility that we might be “no more than” deluxe model apes, that the differences between them and us might be almost wholly differences of degree and not of kind, and that the differences of kind, if they exist, might be elusive—all this was a source of profound discomfort from the earliest days in which human evolution was seriously considered. Just a few years after The Origin of Species was published, Huxley wrote:

  [D]esiring, as I do, to reach the wider circle of the intelligent public, it would be unworthy cowardice were I to ignore the repugnance with which the majority of my readers are likely to meet the conclusions to which the most careful and conscientious study I have been able to give to this matter, has led me.

  On all sides I shall hear the cry—“We are men and women, not a mere better sort of apes, a little longer in the leg, more compact in the foot, and bigger in brain than your brutal Chimpanzees and Gorillas. The power of knowledge—the conscience of good and evil—the pitiful tenderness of human affections, raise us out of all real fellowship with the brutes, however closely they may seem to approximate us.”

  To this I can only reply that the exclamation would be most just and would have my own entire sympathy, if it were only relevant. But, it is not I who seek to base Man’s dignity upon his great toe, or insinuate that we are lost if an Ape has a hippocampus minor [in its brain]. On the contrary, I have done my best to sweep away this vanity …

  We are indeed told by those who assume authority in these matters … that the belief in the unity of origin of man and brutes involves the brutalization and degradation of the former. But is this really so? Could not a sensible child confute, by obvious arguments, the shallow rhetoricians who would force this conclusion upon us? Is it, indeed, true, that the Poet, or the Philosopher, or the Artist whose genius is the glory of his age, is degraded from his high estate by the undoubted historical probability, not to say certainty, that he is the direct descendant of some naked and bestial savage, whose intelligence was just sufficient to make him a little more cunning than the Fox, and by so much more dangerous than the Tiger?28

  Suppose you own a personal computer. It’s roughly the size of a typewriter, sits on your desk, and outcomputes any hundred mathematicians. There was nothing remotely like it on Earth only a few decades ago. Building on the strengths of this model, the manufacturer now introduces a relatively minor variant with a faster and more powerful microprocessor and a few new peripherals. Surely this is not as remarkable an accomplishment as the invention of the personal computer in the first place. But the new computer, you find, can perform a range of functions the old one couldn’t. It can figure certain problems out in a reasonable span of time that previously would have taken—for all intents and purposes—forever. There are whole categories of problems you can now solve that you couldn’t come within hailing distance of before. But if solving these problems were somehow important for the survival of the personal computer, pretty soon there would be a large number of personal computers with the added capabilities. Perhaps our uniqueness is no more than, or only a little more than, this: an enhancement of well-established pre-existing talents for invention, forethought, language, and general intelligence, enough to cross a threshold in our capacity to understand and change the world.

  Still, depending on what else they are allied with, greater reasoning skills need not—necessarily and in all circumstances—be adaptive and improve survival. “Reason more than anything else is man,”29 said Aristotle. Mark Twain countered:

  I think it is open to dispute … [The] strongest count against [man’s] intelligence is the fact that with that [historical] record back of him he blandly sets himself up as the head animal.30

  If we imagine that we are purely, or even mainly, rational beings, we will never know ourselves.

  We are too weak to destroy or seriously damage the planet, or to extinguish all life on Earth. That is far beyond our powers. But what we can do is
to destroy our global civilization and, just possibly, sufficiently alter the environment as to render our own species, along with vast numbers of others, extinct.31 Even at levels far short of those that can cause our extinction, our technology has given us awesome powers—our ancestors would have thought them god-like. This is merely a statement of fact. It is not a remonstrance and is not intended to define us. But it leads us back again to the question of whether we have any choice in the matter, or whether there is some deeply buried part of our nature that, despite the comparative intelligence and promise of our species, will sooner or later arrange matters for the worst.

  “We are conscious of an animal in us,” wrote Henry David Thoreau, “which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers.”32 The idea is, in a way, obvious; it emerges from even shallow introspection. It goes back at least to Plato,33 who described how in dreams, “when the gentler part of the soul slumbers and the control of Reason is withdrawn … the Wild Beast in us … becomes rampant.” That Wild Beast, Plato goes on, “will cast off all shame and prudence at such moments and stop at nothing”—including incest, murder, and “forbidden food.” The idea of the beast within is also familiar to us from Sigmund Freud, who called it the “id,” Latin for “it,” and from neurophysiology, starting with the work of J. Hughlings Jackson.34 A more recent incarnation can be found in the perspective of the neurophysiologist Paul MacLean,35 who identifies many of the control centers for sex, aggression, dominance, and territoriality in a deep-lying, ancient part of the brain called the R-complex—“R” for reptile, because we share it with the reptiles, who lack much of a cerebral cortex, the seat of consciousness.