The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  But the attempt to find a narrative in evolution, however much that narrative distorts the evidence, is in large part a consequence of the unsettling absence of a plot, an aesthetic shape, in Darwin’s overarching vision. In his old age, he himself brooded on what had happened to him. “Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it,” he recalled in the brief autobiography he wrote for his children,

  poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays.

  These authors, familiar from his childhood, were among his principal companions during the round-the-world voyage on the Beagle. Milton in particular was with him, an intimate presence, when Darwin said farewell to Jemmy Button and Fuegia Basket, or dug in the limestone cliffs of South America for fossils, or measured the beaks of the Galápagos finches.

  Yet though his imagination may have been shaped by Paradise Lost and Henry IV—and, for that matter, by the paintings and music that he loved—the stupendous theory he began slowly to formulate as the Beagle made its way across the Pacific ultimately changed everything in his mental universe. “Now for many years,” he reflected, “I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.”

  Darwin was not proud of this nausea and did not commend it to his children. “The loss of these tastes,” he told them, “is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character.” But he was honest enough to acknowledge it, and he struggled to understand how it had come about. It had, he believed, something to do with his particular enterprise as a scientist, the work with which he had been absorbed for decades, ceaselessly amassing evidence and assessing its significance: “My mind,” he wrote, “seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.”

  I have no solution to what baffled Darwin himself, but the problem returns us to the continuing life of the story of Adam and Eve. For many people today, including me, that story is a myth. The long, tangled history from archaic speculation to dogma, from dogma to literal truth, from literal to real, from real to mortal, from mortal to fraudulent, has ended in fiction. The Enlightenment has done its work, and our understanding of human origins has been freed from the grip of a once-potent delusion. The naked man and woman in the garden with the strange trees and the talking snake have returned to the sphere of the imagination from which they originally emerged. But that return does not destroy their fascination or render them worthless. Our existence would in fact be diminished without them. They remain a powerful, even indispensable, way to think about innocence, temptation, and moral choice, about cleaving to a beloved partner, about work and sex and death. They are unforgettable embodiments at once of human responsibility and of human vulnerability. They convey with exceptional vividness the possibility of deliberately choosing in the pursuit of knowledge to disobey the highest authority or, alternatively, the possibility of being seduced into making a foolish choice whose catastrophic consequences will be felt for all time. They hold open the dream of a return somehow, someday, to a bliss that has been lost. They have the life—the peculiar, intense, magical reality—of literature.

  Epilogue

  In the Forest of Eden

  On an uncomfortably hot and humid February morning, three of us—the evolutionary biologist Melissa Emery Thompson, the field assistant John Sunday, and I—had already walked for almost an hour in search of the chimpanzees that lived somewhere in this part of Uganda’s enormous Kibale National Park. Researchers from the scientific field station where I was staying, the Kibale Chimpanzee Project, had seen them nest near here last night, John assured me, and we would almost certainly find them. The local chimpanzees, called the Kanyawara group, after the nearest village, would not run away from us, as apes in the wild ordinarily would. A team of scientists, led by the evolutionary biologist Richard Wrangham, has been observing them intensively for almost thirty years. In the first weeks, Wrangham told me, he did not see them at all; it was months before he began tentatively to name them; and four years passed before they were comfortable on the ground with the scientists nearby. But over time these apes very slowly became accustomed to the presence of humans.

  I looked up for nests they might have made on the top branches, but I could detect no signs of them. The density and the enormous height of the trees made it difficult for me to make out anything, and the sweat dripping down into my eyes did not improve matters. In any case, chimpanzees have no fixed abode. Whether to be in the neighborhood of new food, to evade the stealthy approach of predators, or to keep their distance from competing chimpanzee groups with whom they are perpetually at war, they nest every night in a different place. That makes finding them a daily challenge.

  We went further into the forest, pushing past vines, thorny brambles, and the long, trailing air roots of the strangler figs—those strange epiphytes that drop from above and surround the host trees, eventually killing them and turning them into supports for their own exuberant growth. We stepped carefully over a platoon of army ants on the move. A tiny frog, the exact color of the leaf on which it sat, hopped away. Tree bark that seemed to shimmer in the half-light revealed itself on closer inspection to be covered with hundreds of caterpillars. Astonishingly beautiful butterflies flitted through the air, as if someone had flung handfuls of old French banknotes from the sky. But no chimpanzees.

  My back began to ache, and I was losing heart, when John abruptly stopped. He had heard something. He looked up and pointed. “Do you see anything?” he asked. At first I saw “nothing at all,” as Hamlet’s mother says when she fails to see the ghost, “yet all that is I see.” But then high in the trees I began to perceive two black silhouettes, then two more on an adjacent tree. For animals so large, the apes were relaxing on what appeared to me to be alarmingly slender branches, but they seemed eerily confident in their perches, and I thought for a moment of trapeze artists in the circus who are immune to ordinary fear. One of them leapt casually from one branch to another, and I caught a glimpse of a pink rump.

  Continuing to stare, I could just barely make out the fruit that the chimpanzees were methodically picking from the trees. They were in no hurry. One of them moved slightly, and I saw that what had first appeared to be a tuft of hair on its back was in fact a baby clinging to its fur. Nothing more happened; there was no history, no event, no adventure, unless the lazy chewing of fruit is deemed an adventure. This then, I thought, is what Paradise must have been: no permanent address, no weary labor, no planting or cultivating, and, at that dizzying height, no predators and no fear. I had glimpsed a part of the ancient dream: “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat.”

  I had come to Uganda in pursuit of that dream, or rather in search of any traces of the Bible story that might be found in what, after Darwin, is now thought to be the actual origins of our species. Moreover, as far as possible, I wanted to make vividly real for myself our modern, scientific origin story. To be sure, we did not descend directly from chimpanzees. Since our lineages diverged millions of years ago from what evolutionary biologists call the Last Common Ancestor, they are not our progenitors but rather our near cousins. Yet they are, many scientists believe, much closer to the Last Common Ancestor in their physical form and the form of their social existence than we are. This is in part because they continue to live in the same forest environment—tragically shrinking every day, through the devastating force of deforestation and human population pressure—in which our distant progenitors lived.

  We hominins, by contrast, left the forest to forage on the savannas. In a stupendous evolutionary gamble, we gave up the magical power to live at the vertiginous heights. There were many experime
nts over millions of years, alternative human species that arose and then became extinct. At the glacial pace set by natural selection, we slowly lost the immense muscle strength and the knuckle-walking and the large canines. Instead, we developed the ability to walk and run upright on our two feet, and we pushed the size of our brains to the limit, the limit, that is, of the female pelvis. Over a vast expanse of time, we mastered fire, increased our ability to cooperate with one another, and, almost incredibly, invented language. This astonishing set of changes was our triumph, of course, but it was also a fall from the leisurely treetop life that I witnessed. Down on the ground, surrounded by fearsome predators, we gradually made our way, through our superior cleverness, to species dominance, transforming ourselves from prey into the greatest predators of them all.

  Now, largely thanks to us, the chimpanzees are an endangered species. There are currently some 150,000 left in the wild, and unless drastic measures are taken, they are likely to shrink further, until they survive only in zoos or in the grim operating rooms of medical research facilities. But for the moment, in a few places, it is still possible to see them living lives that conjure up our own existence before we became the wise hominins—Homo sapiens—that we are.

  The scientists in the Kibale Chimpanzee Project name each of the animals and recognize them almost instantly, the way we might recognize Uncle Al and Cousin Beatie. They assess their personalities, chart their health, and track their fates. “That is Eslom,” Melissa said, pointing to one of the shadowy forms above our heads, “and the one with the pink rump is Bubbles, carrying her child Basuta.” The apes began to swing themselves down from the heights. In the intensely hierarchical chimpanzee society, Eslom, in his early twenties, was the current alpha male, the undisputed leader of the group of some fifty adult males and females and their offspring.

  Eslom, the field assistant explained to me, was a great success story. His mother was an outsider, from the neighboring chimpanzee community to the north. For the most part, chimpanzees are patrilocal; the mates stay put, and females generally take the risk, as Eslom’s mother did, of migrating to a new group. (Without some such arrangement the small groups would in time suffer the genetic consequences of excessive inbreeding.) Her gamble had succeeded: she had survived the beatings and abuse with which new arrivals to a chimpanzee community are often greeted, usually at the hands of other females. Perhaps when she arrived, she was in heat, a condition highly visible in this species from the pink swelling of the skin around her genitals. The swelling would, researchers speculate, have functioned as a passport, giving the alluring stranger a measure of protection from one or more of the males.

  Over the years, she bore three children, one of them being Eslom. But then she died, as did two of her offspring, leaving the sole survivor a young, unprotected, very low-ranking orphan. But Eslom proved to be adept in all the ways that matter. Agile and alert, he was one of the community’s best hunters, snatching and killing the red colobus monkeys that chimpanzees love to eat as a delicacy. He quickly fathomed the complexities of the social system, grasping with whom to ally himself and when it was time to shift alliances. And, as he grew and matured, he became a master of what are called “displays”: swaying back and forth, he would stand upright with his shoulders hunched and hair bristling out, so that he looked still more massive and intimidating. With his powerful arms, he would tear off tree branches or throw rocks. Then with blinding speed he would rush toward a rival, forcing him out of the way or slapping him. Through such tactics, endlessly repeated, he gradually rose in rank.

  When the reigning alpha male died, there was a power vacuum. One by one, over an extended time, the higher-ranking males were compelled to acknowledge Eslom’s authority. Finally, only one rival, Lanjo, was left to challenge him. The scientists know, from analyzing the urine and feces samples that they collect, that Eslom and Lanjo had the same father, Johnny. But Johnny was dead, and in any case chimpanzee males have no way of knowing who their fathers are. The rivals had no idea then that they were half-brothers on their father’s side, and it would not have mattered if they did.

  With the support of his mother, his maternal siblings, and other allies, Lanjo seemed the stronger candidate for supremacy. But when Eslom managed to sink his large fangs into Lanjo’s neck, driving him screaming up a tree, the struggle for dominance was finally over. All the chimpanzees in the group, males and females alike, performed rituals of submission—known as pant-grunts—to him, while he pant-grunted to no one. Anyone who failed to submit risked slaps or full-scale beatings from the angry alpha or from his erstwhile rival, now the beta male.

  Yet when the chimpanzees dropped to the ground, I saw before me not a display of power, but rather of mutual comfort. It was a vision of collective Edenic tranquility, as if the first humans had already managed to reproduce and multiply before they were expelled from the Garden. They lounged there, some eight or ten adult males and females with their children, and began to form pairs, carefully combing through their partner’s fur for insects, dirt, and wounds, looking into each other’s ears, gently scratching and stroking. The chimpanzees of Kibale and a few other places, to the great fascination of the scientists, have developed a special grooming technique: one chimpanzee raises a long arm into the air and another chimpanzee mimics the gesture, clasping hands or touching wrists together, while with the other hand they groom one another. The technique is distinctive enough, where it has been transmitted from one generation to the next, that some scientists have claimed that it is evidence that chimpanzees possess what we call culture.

  This group of cultured chimpanzees stayed at it for a very long time, long enough for me to begin to know each of them by name. Outamba, in her late thirties, was the most fecund of the mothers; with six children as well as a grandson, she was once again pregnant. Several of her offspring were there and took turns grooming her. Stella, the eighteen-month-old daughter of another female in the group, was clearly hyperactive. She could not stay still for a minute, either to rest or be groomed, but constantly climbed over her mother and everyone else, slipping down their sides as if they were slides, throwing leaves in the air, breaking off small branches and swinging them recklessly around. I thought for sure that she would be slapped, but the adults were all amazingly tolerant of her zaniness. The adult male Bud nursed wounds he had received from an enemy group that he had encountered. He was lucky to have somehow escaped; had he not, they might have ripped off his testicles and beaten him to death. Big Brown, a huge male considerably larger than Eslom, sat quietly apart, chewing on the pith inside a shoot. Old for a chimpanzee in the wild—he was in his fifties—he had dropped to a low rank and had to pant-grunt to almost every other adult male. Years ago he had been the alpha, but his reign, characterized by his frequent beatings of the females, had come to an end. Eslom too on occasion beat the females—such is the manner of chimpanzee males—but, whenever he had caught and killed a monkey, he always shared the meat first with them, and in doing so he had patiently generated loyalty.

  Eslom was less relaxed than the others in the group. He was preoccupied with the female Bubbles, whose rump, already visible high in the trees, revealed itself on the ground to be spectacularly swollen. In her mid-fifties, Bubbles was quite a bit older than the twenty-two-year-old Eslom, but she was in heat. Chimpanzee females continue to ovulate through most of their lifetime, and chimpanzee males are particularly aroused by older females who have demonstrated the ability to bear children. The alpha male, wanting her exclusively for himself, was engaged in what is called mate-guarding. Whenever another male came too close to her, Eslom’s hair would ominously stand on end, and the ambitious suitor would beat a hasty retreat. Chimpanzee copulation is less about pleasure—it takes on average six seconds—than about reproduction: in principle the alpha’s goal is to father all of the offspring.

  Bubbles, for her part, would probably have been happy to mate with many of her suitors, for while it is in the interest of the alpha to monopol
ize her, females generally seek to have intercourse with as many of the senior males as possible. (Females, Melissa told me, go out of their way to copulate with the males who have been most aggressive toward them.) Promiscuity, scientists speculate, is a survival strategy, not for the females but for their offspring. For since chimpanzee mothers typically nurse their young for years and only go back into heat when they are weaned, the more powerful males may on occasion practice infanticide, in order to hasten a return to sexual availability. If the female has copulated with many males, the speculation goes, each will think that the newborn might well be his and will be less prone to violence.

  But today at least, while I observed them, Eslom chased off all potential suitors. He was determined to cling to and merge with his desired partner. “This one,” the alpha male insisted, with all the strength of his muscular body; “this one.” Bubbles looked around and complied. She turned and presented her swollen rump for Eslom to inspect and admire. He looked, sniffed, and was content.

  Observing this scene not as a legitimate natural scientist but merely as a writer fascinated by the biblical story of the primal pair, I felt an odd twinge of shame at my voyeuristic role. And this shame, of course, is part of the story: “The eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.” The chimpanzees have no interest in leaves except on occasion to chew on them. They do not know that they are naked, and they feel absolutely no shame. Though they live in the shadowy depths of a remote forest, their lives are remarkably open to view. The scientists who tirelessly track them and watch their every movement and analyze their urine and fecal samples are able to describe each of them with a degree of intimacy that far exceeds what I could muster for even my closest friends, my children, or my parents.