Such antic hijinks aside, the question remains: Could a properly trained chimpanzee, bonobo, or gorilla be capable of recognizing itself in a mirror? The answer seems to be yes, as psychologist Gordon Gallup demonstrated in a series of famous psychological experiments that probed the capacities of various monkeys and apes for self-recognition.28 First, Gallup allowed his captive subjects to become habituated to mirrors by placing one in their cage for ten days. (This was, of course, an advantage that the curious but utterly perplexed wild ape at Gombe didn’t have.) And both monkeys and apes took great interest in their images, but after ten days it was still impossible to tell whether they considered the image to be perhaps a stranger of their own species or themselves.
Next, Gallup applied small dots of red pigment to their faces while they were sedated, placing the dots where they would not be visible without a mirror. (Both monkeys and apes have color vision, and they tend to “react” to the color red on a living being—possibly because it suggests the presence of blood.) Then, he allowed his subjects to wake up completely before he replaced the mirrors in their cages. In response, macaque monkeys at best would show some interest or alarm at the reflection, perhaps as though seeing another monkey that was wounded. But upon first seeing their images in the mirror, often the chimpanzees and bonobos, and eventually to a lesser degree gorillas, immediately and consistently touched the red dot on their own faces as if following a cognitive process along the lines of: That thing has to be on me! The responsive great apes obviously realized that the image was their own, and subsequent experiments have shown that certain other highly social, large-brained species can do something similar.29
Gallup’s rather narrow test of “selfhood” confirms what language-laboratory researchers sense intuitively about the apes they work with. They readily learn their own names as well as the names of others, and they are capable of playfully manipulating their images in mirrors, for instance, with makeup. In general, they act as though they understand at some level who they are as social beings, and in fact one female chimpanzee named Washoe, who had been taught to use sign language, seemed to have been convinced that she was a human. Indeed, the first time she saw another chimpanzee she signed, “BLACK BUG!”30
In humans it’s the individual capacity to understand that there is a self, which exists in relation to others, that makes it possible for people to participate in moral communities. Obviously, mere self-recognition does not make for a moral being with a fully developed conscience, but a sense of self is an important and necessary first step. It’s useful in gauging the reactions of others to a person’s behavior and in understanding their intentions. And it’s especially important to understand that the person can become the center of a hostile group’s attention if his or her actions seriously offend its moral sensibilities. The aforementioned capacity to take on the perspective of others not only underlies the ability of individuals in human communities to modify their behavior and follow the rules being imposed by the group, but it also allows people acting as groups to predict and insightfully cope with the behavior of “deviants.”
Even for field researchers like myself who have had the opportunity to observe chimpanzees long term in their natural habitat, it can be difficult to say whether they are “perspective taking”—which means taking into account others’ motives and reactions—nearly as well as socially sophisticated humans do. However, in captive experiments a chimpanzee can deliberately engage in perspective taking in order to deceive other apes.
In a truly ingenious experiment, a young male was allowed to see the researcher bury some fruit in a large outdoor enclosure, while the rest of the sizable group remained out of sight. When the entire group was allowed to enter the enclosure, of course the young male went straight for the food.31 As the experiment was repeated, the older, higher-ranking males soon learned that the young male would know exactly where the food had been hidden, and thereafter they simply watched his movements, and as he began to dig up the food, they—being dominant chimpanzees—chased him away and ate it themselves. As the experiment went on, however, the young male demonstrated that he could get inside the heads of these dominators and outwit them. In later tests, he would rush to a location where he knew there was no fruit and excitedly begin to dig. When the others followed suit, the low-ranking young chimp would unobtrusively move to the actual site of the buried fruit, managing to eat at least some of it himself before his superiors noticed him and rushed over.
Basic elements of perspective taking also are discernible in chimpanzees in situations that are not patently experimental. For instance, primatologist Frans de Waal describes the case of two males in a large captive group who were vying for the dominant alpha position. As they were trying to threaten each other, they both exhibited the characteristic highly visible toothy grimaces that advertise fear.32 This facial expression is involuntary, but as the contest dragged on, one of the two males cleverly started to place his hand over his mouth to deny his rival the visual cue that he himself was feeling stressed. A somewhat similar behavior has been reported at Gombe, where an excited wild male tried very hard to suppress his own involuntary food calls in order to avoid losing precious provisioned bananas to just-out-of-sight rivals who were alerted by the calls.33
We humans resort to deception all the time, and telling a credible lie requires that we fashion our words very carefully to create a well-constructed illusion in another person’s mind. To take an extreme instance, a successful bigamist must display these skills to the nth degree, taking into account many variables such as how suspicious or trusting his (or conceivably her) respective mates are likely to be and what kinds of excuses will fly with each of them. But sly deception is just one of the many uses of perspective taking.
When large-brained animals are evolved to live in hierarchical social groups, they are likely to exhibit a fairly sophisticated basis for assessing the motives of others, either in order to competitively dominate them or simply to survive and try to flourish in a less stressful subordinate role. Perspective taking34 also can involve reckoning what a group of others may do if an individual’s behavior makes her or his peers become so aggressive that they begin to act as an angry, aroused coalition. All of these skills are useful to the individual, and their strong persistence among all four of the African great apes today (technically humans are, whether we like it or not, an African ape35) tells us that they have been providing individual fitness benefits for at least 8 million years.
This means that an important head start already existed whenever environmental changes began to stimulate conscience evolution in earlier humans. But taken by itself, this particular preadaptation, the primitive “self,” was not in any way moral, for morality involves a pointed sense of right and wrong coupled with a sense of shame and, on the opposite side of the coin, a sense of honor and pride.
FOLLOWING THE RULES—OR ELSE
At a bare minimum, humans and the three other ape species that originated in Africa also know intuitively what a “rule” is. This usually involves a stronger individual’s demanding a certain type of behavior or insisting on the absence of an unwanted behavior, and the expectation is backed up by a potentially hurtful authority. However, for a Bushman hunter-gatherer, living in some remote place out on the vast Kalahari Desert, the most salient authority of all will be the egalitarian local group as a whole. The band can be a stern authority, indeed, first because its social expectations are intensified by being moral, and second because such people are in the habit of using weapons to kill mammals the size of humans or larger. This means that an outraged group can become an aggressively hurtful group.
People like Bushmen or Pygmies gossip incessantly and are highly judgmental, and group opinion is something to be feared because moral outrage can lead to ostracism, expulsion from the group, or even execution. This is true of all hunter-gatherers. For instance, as we saw in Chapter 4, if an overbearing individual were to kill one band member and then killed another, as a repea
t killer and disliked dominator he’d be dealt with by this collective authority—whether he hunted and gathered out on the Australian semidesert or on an arctic tundra or anywhere else. And he’d be dealt with lethally.
Among modern humans, moral authorities can range from parents at home to the immediate community, represented by a local cop or a county sheriff backing up the law. For a believer, there may also be an omnipotent and punitive God. Such authority, be it “informal,” or formalized in statute, or religious, brings with it specific, well-understood rules. We can state such rules in terms as varied as “Thou shalt not steal” or “Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted,” or “No TV tonight until you finish your homework.” Among hunter-gatherers, the supreme authority is the local group that camps together as a band, and Émile Durkheim has described beautifully the near-tyranny that such groups have over the individuals who are driven to conform.36
Among chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas, certain basics seem strikingly similar. Dominant individuals easily impose “rules” on their inferiors. For instance, a subordinate knows that if a small prime feeding site is encountered by a foraging party, the rule is Don’t make the first move, or else you’ll be aggressively threatened or physically attacked by a proprietary dominant. Such nonmoral rules have mainly to do with feeding priority or male access to females for mating, but sometimes they arise out of competition for political position, pure and simple. Indeed, in the wild male chimpanzees devote a great deal of energy to seeing who can rise higher in the male dominance hierarchy, and they bear scars to prove it. (Females are far less competitive.) Compared to chimpanzees, bonobo males seem much less obsessive in competing with other males, but they, too, bear scars, probably mostly from the females who unite to go up against them and contest their authority,37 while in the wild bonobo females also compete for alpha status.
In all of these contests, the rules are both simple and important to individual fitness. The dominator, acting as an authority, insists on either an immediate tangible concession or a sign of deference or appeasement, and as long as this ensues, things will go smoothly. With humans, often it is “society,” rather than a single individual, that serves as the authority, but as we’re about to see, the imposition of at least a few “rules” on individuals by sizable groups was already under way with the Common Ancestor and even more so with its successor, Ancestral Pan.
HIERARCHY CAN BE FLEXIBLE
Richard Wrangham created his portrait of the CA as a group-living killer ape in 1987, and later, in his coauthored book Demonic Males, he greatly expanded this social portrait as he moved on to the ape I’m calling Ancestral Pan and compared bonobos and chimpanzees in looking for the origins of human violence. In Hierarchy in the Forest, when I analyzed the pervasive pecking orders that can be factored into the Common Ancestral equation, it was clear that chimpanzees are so hierarchical that every male knows exactly whom he can back down and whom he must submit to; there’s even a specialized subordinate greeting that makes this clear. Among gorillas, huge silverbacks intimidate all the adults in their harem, while the females have their own pecking order. Bonobos’ social dominance hierarchies are complicated by the fact that males don’t form coalitions and pairs of females regularly gang up against otherwise dominant males and thereby often manage to control the best food. Human hierarchies can be more complicated still, but all of us live in groups with pronounced hierarchical tendencies, and living in such groups requires an understanding of rules.
For humans, there’s the special “egalitarian” twist that I emphasized in Chapter 4, and this merits further discussion because it will be crucial to our evolutionary analysis. If we look to the 150 LPA hunter-gatherer bands that most closely resemble more recent prehistoric human societies, we’ve seen already that they’re highly egalitarian. Minimally, this means that all the active hunters (generally the adult males) insist on being seen as equal and that among themselves they tolerate no serious domination—be this in hogging vital food resources or in bossing others around. Based on assumptions coming out of behavioral ecology, I’ll soon be making the case that very likely such egalitarianism arose—or was greatly intensified—when our predecessors began to go after large game in a serious way.
We’ve already seen what happens with the Bushmen, who preemptively put down a self-aggrandizing citizen before he—it always seems to be a he—can get up a head of steam in the direction of building himself up and acting superior. With such people there’s still some possibility for upward social mobility in the sense that sometimes a wise individual may be accorded the status of temporary or permanent band leader.38 However, that person is expected to behave with humility, for the accepted leadership style permits nothing more assertive than carefully listening to everyone else’s opinion and then gently helping to implement a consensus—if this spontaneously forms. Such decisions may involve a band’s next move or the group’s taking action against a serious deviant, but such leaders by themselves cannot settle on an outcome; this is a decision for the entire group.
ANCESTRAL “SOCIAL CONTROL”
Here we have an important topic that I shall merely introduce at this point. Among wild-living great apes, the most pervasive and routinized group control of individuals probably is to be seen in bonobos, whose coalition behaviors are interesting because female power is significantly augmented. They live in large quasi-territorial communities and forage in mixed parties that include a sizable number of males and females.39 The males compete with other males for dominance position by using their mothers as political allies; they never form such alliances with other males as chimpanzees do so predictably. And because bonobo males are both somewhat larger and definitely more muscular than females, any one-on-one contest sees a high-ranking male bonobo as the predictable winner.
However, a female usually has one or more female allies nearby, and two or more of these feisty bonobo females can readily back down a bigger male and take the preferred food. If a male’s would-be dominance provokes really strong hostility, up to half a dozen aroused females may exert serious control by gang-attacking the offender and biting him severely enough to possibly kill him.40 This social control by coalitions of female bonobos occurs frequently not only in large wild communities but also in smaller captive groups.
Gorillas may also engage in collective social control in rare instances. The females are only about half the size of silverbacks, and because they live in harems and compete to see who can stay in closest proximity to their huge male protector, these females are not likely to form counterdominant coalitions the way bonobos do. However, captive situations can bring out aspects of a species’ social potential that might be seen only very rarely in the wild. Reported is a case in which a young adult blackback male presided over a harem of several females, until one day a huge silverback obtained from another zoo was introduced with the expectation that he would immediately take over the group, dominate it, and adjudicate its quarrels. Instead, the united females attacked him so vigorously that he was left cowering in one corner of the enclosure and had to be removed.41 In this case the contention was not about food but about who would dominate the group, and this social control by several united females was effective in decisively rejecting the enormous, physically powerful newcomer.
Chimpanzee coalitions exert social control in a variety of ways. In the wild, female chimpanzees, unlike bonobos, have to forage alone much of the time because their food supply is not so plentiful, and for that reason they have inadequate opportunity to form alliances with other females. As a result, unlike the bonobos, the lowest adult male on the totem pole can dominate even the toughest female because it’s always “one on one.”42 On the other hand, males are continuously forming small coalitions in hope of unseating the alpha, and this can undermine his power unless he forms effective coalitions of his own. Thus, the males are constantly making use of dyadic alliances to gain a competitive edge.
At times, subordinate male chimpanzees, sometimes with the help
of adult females, may decide to collectively buck the disliked authority of one of their community’s high-ranking males by ganging up in large numbers to attack him and drive him out of the group. Though rare, this has happened several times at two different field sites in Tanzania,43 and in one case a rejected bully who had once been alpha disappeared, never to be seen again. As with bonobos, this brings chimpanzees perilously close to practicing capital punishment by group action, and it seems that they make their decisions based on what primatologist Frans de Waal calls “community concern.” By this, he means that they care about controlling aggressively disruptive individual behaviors that potentially harm the interests of other community members.44
When chimpanzees live in large captive groups, things most definitely change for the females. Being well provisioned, they no longer need to go out alone to forage, which means they can now form strong political bonds with other females—just as female bonobos are able to do in the wild because their food is plentiful and their foraging parties are so large. These formidable female captive chimps go beyond their bonobo counterparts as they join together in still larger counterdominant coalitions that make serious inroads into male power. They do so by enforcing a few simple rules. These united females are most prone to gang-attack a male who wants to take out his frustrations by beating up the nearest female—a behavior that is quite routine in the wild. Captive females not only control such male aggression against females, but, by reacting as a whole community, they also often can control male bullying in general. Frans de Waal describes such an incident, which involves the alpha male’s becoming aggressive against a much lesser male:
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