The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  Far and away the most influential people in persuading the wider public that ethology was valuable were three extraordinary women in Africa, whose imaginative and brave forays into the bush proved remarkably successful. These were Joy Adamson, who worked with lions in Kenya, Jane Goodall, who investigated chimpanzees at Gombe Stream, in Tanzania, and Dian Fossey, who spent several years working with gorillas in Uganda.

  The Adamsons – Joy and George – were old Africa hands since before World War II, and friends of the Leakeys (George Adamson had been a locust control officer and a gold prospector in Kenya since 1929). Joy, of Austrian birth, was ‘an often-married, egotistical, wilful and at times unstable woman of great energy and originality.’5 In 1956, near where they lived, a lion had attacked and eaten a local boy. With others, George Adamson set off in pursuit of the man-eater, which by custom had to be killed because, having been ‘rewarded,’ it would certainly return. A female lion was found, and duly shot. However, three very young cubs were discovered nearby, still with film over their eyes, and were raised by the Adamsons. Two were eventually acquired by a zoo, while the Adamsons kept the other, the ‘plainest,’ named after an equally plain relative, Elsa.6 Thus began the Adamsons’ observations of lion behavior. These were hardly systematic in, say, a laboratory sense, but the closeness of the relationship between human and animal was nonetheless new and enabled certain insights into mammal behavior that would otherwise not have been made. For example, ‘Elsa’s most remarkable demonstration of understanding and restraint occurred when she knocked over a buffalo in the Ura and was efficiently drowning it. While her blood was still up, Nuru, a Muslim, rushed down to cut the animal’s throat before it died so that he and other Africans could eat some of the meat. For a second Elsa turned on him, but suddenly realised he had come to share, not steal, her kill.’7

  In 1958, for a variety of reasons, one of which was Elsa’s growing strength and uncontrollability (she had at one stage taken Joy’s head in her mouth), the lioness was reintroduced into the wild. This, a dangerous exercise for her, was completed successfully, but on several occasions thereafter she reappeared, accompanied by her new family, and for the most part behaved in a docile, friendly manner. It was now that Joy Adamson conceived the series of three books that were to make her famous: Born Free (1959), Living Free (1960), and Forever Free (1961).8 The many photographs of apparently friendly lions had just as much impact as the text, if not more so, helping the book to sell more than five million copies in a dozen languages, not to mention a major movie and several documentaries. Joy had originally taken on the cubs because they were ‘orphans,’ and, in the 1950s, maternal deprivation in humans was, as we have seen, an important issue in the wake of war. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Joy and/or George continued to live close to lions, exploring in an informal but unique way their real nature. They were criticised for ‘ruining’ lions, making them less lionlike because they were friendly to humans, but between them the Adamsons were able to show that, fierce and wild as lions undoubtedly are, their violence is not completely programmed, by no means 100 percent instinctive; they at least appear to be capable of affection or respect or familiarity, and the needs of their stomach are not always paramount. tell Hughes, Britain’s poet laureate, had this to say in reviewing Born Free: ‘That a lioness, one of the great moody aggressors, should be brought to display such qualities as Elsa’s, is a step not so much in the education of lions as in the civilisation of man’*9

  Jane Goodall, like Dian Fossey after her, was a protégé of Louis Leakey. Apart from his other talents, Leakey was a great womaniser, who had affairs with a number of female assistants. Goodall had approached Leakey as early as 1959, the year of Zinj, begging to work for/with him. When he met her, Leakey noted that Goodall was very knowledgeable about animals, and so was born a project that had been simmering at the back of his mind for some time. He knew of a community of chimpanzees at Gombe Stream, near Kigoma on the shore of Lake Tanganyika. Leakey’s thinking was simple: Africa had a very rich ape population; man had evolved from the apes; and so the more we discovered about them, the more we were likely to understand how mankind – humanity – had evolved. Leakey thought Goodall suitable because, while she was knowledgeable, she wasn’t too academic, and her mind wasn’t ‘cluttered by theory.’ Not that there was much theory at the time – ethology was a new subject – but Goodall loved her assignment, and both her official reports and her popular account, In the Shadow of Man, published in 1971, managed to be both scientifically important and moving at the same time.10

  Goodall found that it took the chimpanzees some months to accept her, but once they did she was able to get close enough to observe their behavior in the wild and to distinguish one chimpanzee from another. This simple insight proved extremely important. She was later criticised by other, more academically grounded scientists for giving her chimps names – David Greybeard, Flo, Flint, Flame, Goliath – instead of more neutral numbers, and for reading motives into chimp actions, but these were lame criticisms when set against the richness of her material.11 Her first significant observation occurred when she saw a chimp insert a thin stick into a termite mound in order to catch termites that attached themselves to the stick – the chimp then raised the stick to its lips. Now here was a chimp using a tool, hitherto understood to be the hallmark of humanity. As the months passed, the social/communal life of these primates also began to reveal itself. Most notable was the hierarchy of males and the occasional displays of aggression that brought about this ranking, which by and large determined sexual privilege in the troupe, but not necessarily priority in food gathering. But Goodall also recorded that much of the aggressive displays were just that – displays – and that once the less dominant male had made deferential or submissive gestures, the dominant animal would pat his rival in what appeared to be a gesture of reassurance. Goodall also observed mother-offspring behavior, the importance of social grooming (picking unwanted matter out of each other’s fur), and what appeared to be familial feeling. Young chimpanzees who for some reason lost their mothers shrivelled physically and/or became nervous – what we would call neurotic; and brothers, though they often fought with or were indifferent to each other, sometimes ran to one another for comfort and reassurance. Controversially, she thought that chimps had a rudimentary sense of self and that children learned much behavior from their mothers. In one celebrated instance, she observed a mother with diarrhoea wipe herself with a handful of leaves; immediately, her two-year-old infant did the same although his bottom was clean.12

  Dian Fossey’s Gorillas in the Mist related her observations and experiences on the Rwanda/Zaire/Uganda border in the 1970s, and concerned one species of mountain gorilla, Gorilla gorilla berengei. While much more impressive physically than the chimpanzee, this primate was and remains the most threatened in terms of numbers. Rwanda is one of the most densely populated African countries, and the gorilla population had by then been falling by an average of 3 percent a year for more than twenty years, to the point where not much more than 250 were left. Fossey’s work was therefore as much a part of ecology as biology.13

  Fossey documented in shocking detail the vicious work of poachers, who sometimes kidnapped animals for zoos and sometimes killed them, cutting off their heads and hands in a primitive ritual. This aspect of her book, when it was published in 1983, shocked the world, stimulating action to conserve the dwindling numbers of an animal that, despite its fierce appearance and ‘King Kong’ reputation, the other part of her argument showed to be unfairly maligned. Fossey found that she was able to habituate herself to at least some of the gorilla groups near her research station, Karisoke, in the volcanic Parc des Virungas. The crucial element here was that she had learned what she called ‘belch vocalisations,’ a soft, deep, purr, ‘naoom, naoom,’ which resembled a stomach rumbling. These sounds, she found, which express contentment in gorillas, announced her presence and set the animals at ease to the point where, eventually, she could sit
among them, exchanging sounds and observing close up. She found that gorillas had a family structure much closer to that of humans than did chimpanzees. They lived in relatively stable groups of about ten individuals. ‘A typical group contains: one silverback, a sexually mature male over the age of fifteen years, who is the group’s undisputed leader and weighs roughly 375 pounds, or about twice the size of a female; one blackback, a sexually immature male between eight and thirteen years weighing some 250 pounds; three to four sexually mature females over eight years, each about 200 pounds, who are ordinarily bonded to the dominant silverback for life; and, lastly, from three to six immature members, those under eight years…. The prolonged period of association of the young with their parents, peers, and siblings offers the gorilla a unique and secure type of familial organisation bonded by strong kin ties. As the male and female offspring approach sexual maturity they often leave their natal groups. The dispersal of mating individuals is perhaps an evolved pattern to reduce the effects of inbreeding, though it seems that maturing individuals are more likely to migrate when there are no breeding opportunities within the group into which they are born.’14

  Fossey found that different gorillas had very different characters, and that they used some seven different sounds – including alarm calls, pig-grunts when travelling, rebuttals to other sounds, and disciplinary enforcements between adults and young. Unfortunately, Dian Fossey was unable to further her studies; at the end of 1985 she too, like the Adamsons, was murdered. Her black tracker and her white research assistant were both accused, though the charges against her tracker were dropped. Fearful of not receiving a fair trial, the white assistant fled the country, later to be convicted in his absence.15 In the short run, Fossey’s battle against poaching was more important than her ethological observations, as her death shows. But only in the short run. For example, her sensitive description of the gorilla Icarus’s response to the death of another, Marchesa, raised profound questions about gorilla ‘grief and the nonhuman understanding of death. In many ways, the evolutionary psychology of gorillas is even more enlightening than that of chimpanzees.

  George Schaller, director of the Wildlife Conservation Division of the New York Zoological Society, made it his life’s work to study some of the ecologically threatened large animals of the world, in the hope that this would contribute to their survival. In a long career, he spent time studying pandas, tigers, deer, and gorillas but his most celebrated study, published in 1972, was The Serengeti Lion.16 This book, which also included sections on the cheetah, leopard, wild dogs, and hyenas, took up where the Adamsons left off, in that Schaller was much more systematic and scientific in his approach – he counted the number of lions, the times of the day they hunted, the number of times they copulated, and the number of trees they marked out as their territory.17 While this did not make his book an enthralling read, his overall picture of the delicate balance in Africa between predator and prey had a marked effect on the ecological movement. He showed that far from harming other wildlife (as was then thought), predators were actually good influences, weeding out the weaker vessels among their prey, keeping the herds healthy and alert. He also made the point that although lions were not as close to man as chimpanzees or gorillas were in phylogenetic terms, they were quite close in ecological terms to, say, Australopithecus. He argued that lions’ hunting techniques were far more likely to resemble early man’s, and his own studies, he said, showed that lions could hunt efficiently in prides without any sophisticated vocalisation or language. He did not therefore think that language in man necessarily evolved to cope with hunting, as other scholars believed.18

  The final study in this great scientific safari on the Kenya/Tanzania/Uganda border was Ian Douglas-Hamilton’s investigation of elephants. A student of Nikolaas Tinbergen at Oxford, Douglas-Hamilton had originally wanted to study lions but was told that George Schaller had got there first. Douglas-Hamilton’s study, published as Among the Elephants in 1975, was a cross between the Adamson-Goodall-Fossey approach and Schaller’s more distanced research, mainly because elephants are far harder to habituate to in the wild.19 He observed that elephants keep to family and kinship units and appear to show affection to other family members, which extends to a characteristic trunk-to-mouth gesture. Although he would never have been so anthropomorphic as to say this was ‘kissing,’ it is hard to know how else to describe it. Several family units make up kinship units. At times of abundant food supply, after the rains, elephants come together in massive 200-strong herds, whereas in drought they break up into smaller family groupings. Elephants show an extraordinary amount of interest in dead elephants – offspring will remain alongside the body of a dead mother for days, and a herd will sometimes dismember the carcass of an erstwhile colleague. Douglas-Hamilton’s research meticulously catalogued which elephant stood next to which, and showed that there were clearly long-term ‘friendships.’20 As with the other big mammals of Africa, Douglas-Hamilton observed great individuality among elephants.

  Much farther north than Olduvai, but still part of the Rift, the great valley splits into two: one part of the Y extends northeast into the Gulf of Aden, whereas the other heads northwest along the Red Sea. The area between the two arms of the Y is known as the Afar Triangle and is part of Ethiopia.

  To begin with, the sites in Afar had been excavated by the Leakeys, especially Louis’s son, Richard. They had dug there by invitation of Emperor Haile Selassie, who was himself interested in the origins of humankind and, on a state visit to Kenya in 1966, had met Louis Leakey and encouraged him to come north. Early digs consolidated the picture emerging farther south but were overshadowed by a discovery made by a rival French-American team. The guiding spirit of this team was Maurice Taieb, a geologist, who made the Afar Triangle his speciality (it was geologically unique). He called in a palaeontologist he had met elsewhere in Ethiopia, Don Johanson, a graduate student at Chicago University. Taieb had found an area, named Hadar, which he regarded as very fruitful – it was several thousand square kilometres in size and very rich in fossils. An expedition society was formed, which initially had the Leakeys as members. What happened on that expedition, and subsequently, became one of the most controversial incidents in palaeontology.

  In November 1974, four miles from his camp, Johanson spotted a fragment of an arm bone sticking out of a slope. At first he thought it belonged to a monkey, but ‘it lacked the monkey’s distinguishing bony flange.’21 His eye fell on another bony fragment higher up the slope – then a lower jaw, ribs, some vertebrae. He had in fact found the most complete hominid skeleton yet discovered, about 40 percent of the entire structure, and from the shape of the pelvic bone, almost certainly female. That night, back at camp, the team celebrated with beer and roast goat, and Johanson played the Beatles song ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ over and over again. Famously, and unscientifically, the skeleton, officially recorded as AL 288–1, became known as ‘Lucy.’22 The unparalleled importance of Lucy at the time was the fact that her anatomy indicated she had walked upright and could be precisely dated as being between 3.1 and 3.2 million years old. Her skull was not complete, but there was enough of it for Johanson to say that it was in the ape-size range. Her molar teeth were human-like, but the front molars were not bicuspids like ours.

  Haile Selassie was overthrown in September 1974 in a coup which resulted in a Marxist military dictatorship in Ethiopia. This made work difficult, but Johanson managed to return and in 1975 made a yet further extraordinary discovery: a ‘first family’ of thirteen individuals – males, females, adults, juveniles, children, some two hundred fossils at one site, Site 333, as it became known. And in the following year, 1976, together with the French archaeologist Hélène Roche, he found simple basalt tools, dating back to 2.5 million years. This all meant a complete revision of humankind’s origins. Tool-making was much older than anyone imagined, as was upright walking. And it was clearly something indulged in first by Australopithecus, not the Homo genus.


  Further finds in Hadar were prevented by another deterioration in the political situation in Ethiopia (another military coup in Addis Ababa). During this interregnum the southern end of the Rift Valley came back into the spotlight. In the mid-1970s Mary Leakey had been working in Laetoli, a site thirty miles from Olduvai, an area of sandstone gullies that cut into a plateau, very different from the gorge. She had been going there for many years and had recently found two jaws dating from 3.6 to 3.8 million years ago. In the last week of July 1976 she was joined by four other scientists, among them Andrew Hill and Kay Behrensmeyer. The newcomers, in high spirits, were all taken on a tour of the site on the morning after their arrival, and an elephant-dung fight broke out. Ducking into a flat gully to look for ammunition, Hill and Behrensmeyer came across a hard layer of volcanic ash – in which, as they suddenly noticed, there were elephant footprints. They dropped to their knees for a closer look, and then called the others. These were not fresh prints, but fossilised, and scattered near the elephant tracks were those of buffalos, giraffes, and birds. There were even a few ancient raindrops. What must have happened was that a spurt of volcanic ash, given off by a nearby mountain, had settled and then been rained upon, turning it into a form of cement. While this ‘cement’ was wet, animals walked across it, then another layer of ash was deposited on the top. Over the centuries, the top layer had weathered away to reveal the fossil footprints. It was an unusual find, but Mary Leakey told everyone to look out for hominid footprints – that would certainly make news. They searched all through August, but not until one day in September did they find some prints that looked hominid, with signs of a big toe. There were two sets, one much larger than the other, and they stretched for eighteen feet across the ancient ‘cement.’ In February 1978 Mary Leakey felt confident enough to announce the discovery. What was especially interesting was that the volcanic ash was dated to 3.7 million years ago, slightly earlier than the Ethiopian sites. From the pattern of indentations, some experts thought that whoever this hominid was, he did not walk upright all the time. So was this the period when man first began to walk upright?23