The misestimation of our near genetic neighbors in the cinema has never abated since King Kong set the high-water mark for countless scary gorilla movies. Degrading stage acts with live chimps and orangutans dressed in human clothes began in vaudeville and continue today. From the indignities of the organ grinder to Bedtime for Bonzo, primates have never had a chance to be themselves in our eyes.
As columnist Boston wrote of primates, “Perhaps it is precisely their proximity to the human that has made people so beastly to them.” Not that they have always stood by and taken their mistreatment. As a teenager I felt a righteous pleasure watching the monkeys at Colorado’s Cheyenne Mountain Zoo as they gaily flung their droppings through the bars or masturbated before shocked dads and moms and curious kids. But their opportunities to bite back have been few. When we tell someone “Don’t make a monkey out of yourself” or “Cut the monkey business,” we express our true attitudes; and we can be sure that in all of our dealings with them, apes have had less fun than a barrel of monkeys.
Nothing reveals our genus confusion as sharply as gorillas. Reports of gorillas, brought by Carthaginian seamen, reached Europe some twenty-five hundred years ago. But the lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) was not actually seen by Western scientists until 1847, and the mountain gorilla (G. g. beringei) not until 1902. When an American explorer, Paul du Chaillu, went to Africa in 1861 and brought back hides and bones, he colored his find with lurid and false accounts of the animal’s vicious behavior. “The Great Gorilla Controversy,” as the Daily Telegraph called it, erupted in Britain concerning the true nature of the beast. Recently sensitized by Darwin, Europeans wanted to know whether they were indeed related to the gorilla and whether it was the monster Du Chaillu had described.
Zoologist Richard Owen and others doubted Du Chaillu’s veracity, but another century would pass before George Schaller’s gorilla field studies first illuminated the animal scientifically. Not until Dian Fossey’s remarkable and courageous study of the mountain gorillas in Rwanda was their truly gentle, complex nature understood. Her tragic murder in 1985, four years after publication of Gorillas in the Mist, underscored just which primate is capable of monstrous behavior. Of course, she already knew this; gorillas with whom she had bonded were decapitated by poachers who sold their heads and hands for souvenirs. Fossey was sometimes accused of caring more for gorillas than for people. Had she lived to see Rwanda ripped by tribal butchery in 1994, Fossey would have found her species loyalty even more severely tried and her concern for the beloved gorillas magnified.
When media magnate Ted Turner announced a large prize for a novel that would point to a positive way out of our environmental dilemmas, the winner, in 1992, was Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. The title figure is a gorilla who has acquired deep knowledge and the ability to communicate with human beings telepathically. Ishmael becomes a teacher in search of a student, who turns out to be the narrator. The gist of his lesson is contained in this quotation:
The people of your culture cling with fanatical tenacity to the specialness of man. They want desperately to perceive a vast gulf between man and the rest of creation. This myth of human superiority justifies their doing whatever they please with the world . . . But in the end this mythology is not deeply satisfying. The Takers are a profoundly lonely people. The world for them is enemy territory, and they live in it everywhere like an army of occupation, alienated and isolated by their extraordinary specialness.
By chance, when I was buying Quinn’s book at Powell’s Books in Portland, I first spotted Roger Price’s J.G., the Upright Ape. This 1960 novel also employs the device of a gorilla as the protagonist. J.G. is a member of a fictional high-elevation subspecies called the silver gorillas. His search for his abducted mate, Lotus, in America becomes a vehicle for sharp, witty satire of contemporary culture. “For the first time in his life, J.G. was unhappy. It required great concentration on his part, because it isn’t easy to be unhappy when you have such a tiny brain.”
Neither author can challenge Schaller’s and Fossey’s gorilla scholarship, but their fictions point to a conclusion that the researchers might recognize: gorillas—gentle, cooperative, environmentally benign—are in some ways better than humans. Similarly I concluded that by certain measures Sasquatch seems to be the superior animal.
As with Bigfoot, our attitudes toward gorillas are ambivalent. People don gorilla suits in parody of scariness, then behave sentimentally toward the real thing. When Ivan, an orphaned gorilla who spent twenty-seven years on exhibit in a Tacoma shopping mall, was finally transferred to a colony of his species at Zoo Atlanta, scores of well-wishers saw him off, and many tears were shed. It’s the same with Sasquatches: they’re a little frightening, but we’d hate to see them go.
Another similarity between gorillas and Bigfoot is their absence from the fossil record. As John Napier liked to say when he was director of primatology at the Smithsonian Institution, “The story of the gorilla is the very essence of myth except for one thing . . . it happens to be true.” Chimpanzees also lack fossil confirmation, and they too skated between myth and reality until their physical presence became commonplace. Even their Latin name, Pan troglodytes, suggests a mythic dimension. Yet chimps are very much among us, and if our attitudes toward gorillas betray the shapelessness of our apehood, a look at chimps should really rub our noses in our primate connections. Dian Fossey often called gorillas the greatest of the great apes, and so they may be, but chimps are closer to our own kind. Homo diverged from Gorilla around twelve million years ago and from Pan only about eight.
Evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond goes so far as to call Homo “the third chimpanzee” in a book of that name, subtitled The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal. Diamond outlines the genetic-clock (DNA rate of change) experiments that show we share 98.4 percent of our DNA with chimps and 97.7 percent with gorillas. He claims that we should share not only our family (Hominidae) with chimps and gorillas but our genus (Homo) as well. As in the carnival act, Diamond would have the apes blend with us. Some might find that difficult to swallow; but “whenever taxonomists from Outer Space visit Earth to inventory its inhabitants,” he writes, “they will unhesitatingly adopt the new classification.”
For those who lack Diamond’s certainty or Darwin’s equanimity in the matter, who need a sharp distinction between Homo and the rest, crossbreeding experiments might settle the issue. In his unforgettable evolution classes, Yale biology professor Charles Remington used to suggest that interspecies hybridization would demonstrate how the pongid/hominid split is really a silly act of anthropocentrism. “And I will happily volunteer to be the male donor,” he would quip. He was speaking hypothetically and ironically; deeply involved in bioethics classes on campus, Remington was far from cavalier about primate experimentation. But his lectures left me wondering whether such experiments had ever been undertaken.
In 1992 I had the opportunity to meet psychologist James Harlan Elder, the father of a good friend, writer Jane Elder Wulff, shortly before his death at nearly ninety. Elder had been a student of R. M. Yerkes and had supervised all reproductive research at Yale’s Primate Research Laboratory (later named for Yerkes) at Orange Park, Florida, in the 1930s. Later he served as chairman and professor of psychology at Washington State University for twenty years. His former student Alan Hartman wrote that “his work . . . was pivotal in establishing the value of experimental method in the study of infrahuman primate sexual behavior.” By respecting them as individuals, Yerkes and Elder showed clearly that chimps are no mere pawns of instinct; rather, their mating is “a complex biopsychological phenomenon,” as is our own.
Jim and his wife, Leona, became very close to the chimpanzees at Orange Park. Jane Elder Wulff spoke of “a quality in JHE that caused him to respond to sustained intimacy with chimps by becoming more tuned in, expanding his connection with them, becoming their champion—instead of sealing over, seeing them always in the same limited
way, as many animal researchers do with their subjects.” That description also applies nicely to Jane Goodall, who might concur with Elder’s declaration that “if there are no chimps in heaven, I don’t want to go there.”
I asked Elder if he was aware of any hybridization studies conducted at the Yerkes lab or elsewhere. (When I put the same question to Grover Krantz, Elder’s erstwhile colleague at WSU, he said he had heard many rumors and a few jokes but knew of no confirmed instances of actual hybrids.) Elder, still sharp-minded in his terminal illness, responded, “Something like that might have happened, but I didn’t know too much about it.”
Yet I felt Jim knew more than he let on about interspecies mating and that he almost wanted to talk about it. On a later visit he brought up the topic and began to tell one of his wonderfully detailed stories about chimp behavior and human response. But his speech rambled and faded, and he either lost the train of thought or decided against pursuing it. Perhaps if we had known each other earlier in his life, he would have felt safe in sharing his knowledge with me. But before I could visit again, Jim Elder was gone. I’ve often wished I’d met him earlier, and not just because of this point. He was a delight, and I would have liked to discuss Bigfoot with him. But with both Yerkes and Elder gone, we have lost the chance to hear a hidden tale that could cast a glimmer on one of our darkest divides.
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Clarifying our relationship to other primates is important scientifically, but it also influences our interpretation of the Bigfoot myths. As anthropogenist Noel Boaz states in Quarry: Closing In on the Missing Link, “When [the missing link] is found and the circle is closed, there will no longer be a reason to set humanity apart from nature.”
Such a time might be getting closer, with the recent find of seventeen “new” fossil humans in Africa. Presently dated at 4.4 million years, this age makes them a half million years older than Lucy, the previous “oldest human known.” These forms are said to have some chimplike qualities, not surprisingly, since their date puts them more than halfway back to the time when chimps and humans diverged. Language studies with bonobos, or pygmy chimpanzees, also point toward common ground. “The boundary between humans and apes has finally been breached,” wrote Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Roger Lewin in Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind. Kanzi, the most linguistically advanced bonobo to date, can communicate readily and complexly with humans using colored symbols and sign language, and is beginning to make attempts at speech.
But we have a very long way to go until society as a whole embraces its origins. In written testimony to the 1925 Scopes Trial in Tennessee, President Woodrow Wilson said, “It surprises me that at this late date such questions should be raised.” How surprised he would be to learn how many people, presidents among them, still agree with Attorney General Stewart, who told the court: “I don’t believe that I came from the same cell with the monkey and the ass.” Or with William Jennings Bryan, who testified that the theory of evolution had dragged Darwin “down and down and down to helpless and hopeless agnosticism.” Bryan complained that to Darwin “it was all animal, animal, animal.” Of course Bryan was right.
“We must stop pretending we are something we are not,” wrote Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. “Somewhere between romantic, uncritical anthropomorphizing of the animals and an anxious, obdurate refusal to recognize our kinship with them . . . there is a broad middle ground on which we humans can take our stand.” We can seize that ground by seeking a bond that will serve our own survival as well as that of our animal associates. Such a way of thinking is neither pantheism nor animism, for we should worship animals no more than we do men. But as Sagan and Druyan also write, “Those who deny or decry our ‘animal’ natures underestimate what those natures are. Isn’t there much to be proud of . . . in the lives of monkeys and apes?”
In Visions of Caliban: On Chimpanzees and People, Dale Peterson and Jane Goodall masterfully outline our centuries of inhumanity toward our nearest living relatives—what Diamond would call Homo troglodytes, returning Pan’s name to its rightful owner. Peterson identifies chimps with Caliban, the monstrous central character in Shakespeare’s Tempest. He writes that “Shakespeare imagined with astonishing brilliance and foresight how people might behave toward a being they considered to be neither quite beast nor quite human.” Goodall says that “in fighting for the chimpanzees’ survival, [humans] are also fighting for their own,” and her coauthor adds, “Only when we free Caliban will we free ourselves.”
These ideas are illuminating, but they refer to an animal whose existence everyone accepts. Great apes can be seen by anyone near a zoo or a TV, and no one has any excuse to act monstrously toward creatures that we all know are not monsters.
It was different for Shakespeare. The first accounts of African anthropoid apes arrived in London in 1607 with the seafarer Andrew Battel, and The Tempest (a mariner’s tale) was written in 1610–11. For all Shakespeare knew, these subhumans warranted the ignominious descriptions of poor Caliban: “a freckled whelp hag-born . . . got by the devil himself . . . a thing most brutish . . . most scurvy monster.” Peterson’s guess that rumors of chimps inspired the character is a good one. But Shakespeare was seldom one-dimensional in his derivations. What if he had in mind not only apes but all the monsters that dwell within our earthbound brains: what if Caliban is equally Bigfoot?
In 1867, working with pelts and bones brought back by Du Chaillu, London artist Joseph Wolf rendered a remarkably accurate portrayal of a gorilla. Like Shakespeare, the artist brewed bits of evidence with his own fecund impulse to concoct his vision of manlike monstrosity. In the same way, on the basis of tracks and firsthand descriptions, various artists have undertaken to depict Sasquatch. The walls of my study display many such images, ranging from the rather gorilla-like rendition on an illustrated touring map of northern California’s Bigfoot country by Robert Filbey to a postcard of Jim McLarin’s bulky, neckless redwood statue in Willow Creek, from Datus Perry’s stoic and coneheaded version to a whimsical hippie-ape on a produce carton labeled “SAS squash.” We all have an image of Bigfoot, whether we believe in it or not. And that’s how it was with the apes before they finally appeared in zoos. Until we can actually see the face of the beast, we imagine one for it.
Why must we have our Calibans? Not a range of hills, not a hollow, not a shore, not a village of any age at all lacks an ogre, serpent, troll, or some such shade. It is interesting to me that trolls and headless horsemen often are connected with bridges: in the case of the latter, a covered bridge, as in Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” A neighbor of mine, a fourth-generation farmer, told me about our local monster. A ninety-year-old covered bridge crosses the river between Bob Larson’s place and mine. When he was growing up, Bob’s son Brian told me, you never crossed the covered bridge on foot at night without looking out for Old Greenface. I have not garnered many details, but it is clear that Old Greenface is a fright and has been a part of this small community for many years. I can only assume that he survived the recent refurbishment of the bridge; I’ve never seen him, though I go down to the bridge every Halloween midnight.
We come to our monsters young. Bill Watterson’s popular comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes” is richly populated by gruesome under-the-bed fiends whose reality Calvin’s parents will never accept. In Bruce Coville’s darkly compelling story “There’s Nothing under the Bed,” a boy whose parents didn’t believe him is finally abducted into the monster-hole beneath his bed, where he is groomed to be a bringer of unwholesome visions to others. And writer Ray Bradbury tells of his irritation that his mother couldn’t see the monsters on the penultimate step as he went upstairs to bed.
In an essay entitled “Why We Need Our Monsters” in National Wildlife, John G. Mitchell wrote that “there is something about the human condition that seems to demand monsters.” He believes that monster figures arise in cultures that no longer have t
o deal with real ones: “Who needs monsters when there are lions and elephants and rhinos and crocodiles and mountain gorillas . . . Where there are grizzly bears, who needs Bigfoot?” Mitchell may be right in thinking that we replace vanished terrors with made-up ones, but in fact even places with extant big beasts produce mythic monsters. Sasquatch stories abound in Alaska where grizzlies thrive. Mitchell’s theory isn’t enough.
Others have theorized that giants, in particular, are the memories of creatures that once cast shadows beside our own. Russell Ciochon, John Olsen, and Jamie James, the authors of Other Origins: The Search for the Giant Ape in Human Prehistory, write that our awareness of giants might be a mote in our collective conscious from a time when Gigantopithecus blacki and Homo erectus both inhabited the same areas. Since our precursors once walked with giants, they suggest, perhaps all the giants since, including Bigfoot, have been atavistic memories of Giganto. G. blacki is not the only candidate. In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift’s Brobdingnagian philosopher says, “There must have been giants in former times.” (Even giants had their giants!) And so there were. There was Giganto. There was Arctodon simus, a giant bear that inhabited much of North America until about twelve thousand years ago. Oregon naturalist Jim Anderson reminded me that there were enormous Pleistocene ground sloths in North America, which are his candidate for the giants of our ancient dreams.
And there was—or is—the Amazonian jungle sloth that is said to have stood six feet tall and weighed six hundred pounds or more. Conventional wisdom says it became extinct some eighty-five hundred years ago. Yet some biologists are taking seriously reports that the sloth lives on in the remote rain forest, which may account for Mapinguari, the Amazonian cognate of Bigfoot. It is characterized as having the body of a bear, the face of a monkey, a “disabling” stench and a “terrifying” roar “like endless thunder”—monster enough for anyone. Rubber tappers have described the creature for many years, and now some scientists think they have found evidence for it, including huge round tracks with backward claws, hair, and twenty-two pounds of poop.
Where Bigfoot Walks Page 38
