The Naked Ape

by Desmond Morris

  Leaving the subject of smiling, we must now turn to a very different activity. As the months pass, a new pattern of infant behaviour begins to emerge: aggression arrives on the scene. Temper tantrums and angry crying begin to differentiate themselves from the earlier all-purpose crying response. The baby signals its aggression by a more broken, irregular form of screaming and by violent striking out with its arms and legs. It attacks small objects, shakes large ones, spits and spews, and tries to bite, scratch or strike anything in reach. At first these activities are rather random and unco-ordinated. The crying indicates that fear is still present. The aggression has not yet matured to the point of a pure attack: this will come much later when the infant is sure of itself and fully aware of its physical capacities. When it does develop, it, too, has its own special facial signals. These consist of a tight-lipped glare. The lips are pursed into a hard line, with the mouth-corners held forward rather than pulled back. The eyes stare fixedly at the opponent and the eyebrows are lowered in a frown. The fists are clenched. The child has begun to assert itself.

  It has been found that this aggressiveness can be increased by raising the density of a group of children. Under crowded conditions the friendly social interactions between members of a group become reduced, and the destructive and aggressive patterns show a marked rise in frequency and intensity. This is significant when one remembers that in other animals fighting is used not only to sort out dominance disputes, but also to increase the spacing-out of the members of a species. We will return to this in Chapter Five.

  Apart from protecting, feeding, cleaning and playing with the offspring, the parental duties also include the all-important process of training. As with other species, this is done by a punishment-and-reward system that gradually modifies and adjusts the trial-and-error learning of the young. But, in addition, the offspring will be learning rapidly by imitation – a process that is comparatively poorly developed in most other mammals, but superbly heightened and refined in ourselves. So much of what other animals must laboriously learn for themselves, we acquire quickly by following the example of our parents. The naked ape is a teaching ape. (We are so attuned to this method of learning that we tend to assume that other species benefit in the same way, with the result that we have grossly over-estimated the role that teaching plays in their lives.)

  Much of what we do as adults is based on this imitative absorption during our childhood years. Frequently we imagine that we are behaving in a particular way because such behaviour accords with some abstract, lofty code of moral principles, when in reality all we are doing is obeying a deeply ingrained and long ‘forgotten’ set of purely imitative impressions. It is the unmodifiable obedience to these impressions (along with our carefully concealed instinctive urges) that makes it so hard for societies to change their customs and their ‘beliefs’. Even when faced with exciting, brilliantly rational new ideas, based on the application of pure, objective intelligence, the community will still cling to its old home-based habits and prejudices. This is the cross we have to bear if we are going to sail through our vital juvenile ‘blotting-paper’ phase of rapidly mopping up the accumulated experiences of previous generations. We are forced to take the biased opinions along with the valuable facts.

  Luckily we have evolved a powerful antidote to this weakness which is inherent in the imitative learning process. We have a sharpened curiosity, an intensified urge to explore, which work against the other tendency and produce a balance that has the potential of fantastic success. Only if a culture becomes too rigid as a result of its slavery to imitative repetition, or too daring and rashly exploratory, will it flounder. Those with a good balance between the two urges will thrive. We can see plenty of examples of the too rigid and too rash cultures around the world today. The small, backward societies, completely dominated by their heavy burden of taboos and ancient customs, are cases of the former. The same societies, when converted and ‘aided’ by advanced cultures, rapidly become examples of the latter. The sudden overdose of social novelty and exploratory excitement swamps the stabilizing forces of ancestral imitation and tips the scales too far the other way. The result is cultural turmoil and disintegration. Lucky is the society that enjoys the gradual acquisition of a perfect balance between imitation and curiosity, between slavish, unthinking copying and progressive, rational experimentation.

  4

  EXPLORATION

  ALL MAMMALS HAVE a strong exploratory urge, but for some it is more crucial than others. It depends largely on how specialized they have become during the course of evolution. If they have put all their evolutionary effort into the perfection of one particular survival trick, they do not need to bother so much about the general complexities of the world around them. So long as the ant-eater has its ants and the koala bear its gum leaves, then they are well satisfied and the living is easy. The non-specialists, on the other hand – the opportunists of the animal world – can never afford to relax. They are never sure where their next meal may be coming from, and they have to know every nook and cranny, test every possibility, and keep a sharp look-out for the lucky chance. They must explore, and keep on exploring. They must investigate, and keep on re-checking. They must have a constantly high level of curiosity.

  It is not simply a matter of feeding: self-defence can make the same demands. Porcupines, hedgehogs and skunks can snuffle and stomp about as noisily as they like, heedless of their enemies, but the unarmed mammal must be forever on the alert. It must know the signs of danger and the routes of escape. To survive it must know its home range in every minute detail.

  Looked at in this way, it might seem rather inefficient not to specialize. Why should there be any opportunist mammals at all? The answer is that there is a serious snag in the specialist way of life. Everything is fine as long as the special survival device works, but if the environment undergoes a major change the specialist is left stranded. If it has gone to sufficient extremes to outstrip its competitors, the animal will have been forced to make major changes in its genetical make-up, and it will not be able to reverse these quickly enough when the crunch comes. If the gum-tree forests were swept away the koala would perish. If an iron-mouthed killer developed the ability to munch up porcupine quills, the porcupine would become easy prey. For the opportunist the going may always be tough, but the creature will be able to adapt rapidly to any quick-change act that the environment decides to put on. Take away a mongoose’s rats and mice and it will switch to eggs and snails. Take away a monkey’s fruit and nuts and it will switch to roots and shoots.

  Of all the non-specialists, the monkeys and apes are perhaps the most opportunist. As a group, they have specialized in non-specialization. And among the monkeys and apes, the naked ape is the most supreme opportunist of them all. This is just another facet of his neotenous evolution. All young monkeys are inquisitive, but the intensity of their curiosity tends to fade as they become adult. With us, the infantile inquisitiveness is strengthened and stretched out into our mature years. We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species.

  The tendency to be attracted by novelty has been called neophilia (love of the new), and has been contrasted with neophobia (fear of the new). Everything unfamiliar is potentially dangerous. It has to be approached with caution. Perhaps it should be avoided? But if it is avoided, then how shall we ever know anything about it? The neophilic urge must drive us on and keep us interested until the unknown has become the known, until familiarity has bred contempt and, in the process, we have gained valuable experience to be stored away and called upon when needed at a later date. The child does this all the time. So strong is his urge that parental restraint is necessary. But although parents may succeed in guiding curiosity, they can never suppress it. As children grow older their exploratory tendencies sometimes reach alarming proportions and adults can be heard referring to ‘a group of y
oungsters behaving like wild animals’. But the reverse is actually the case. If the adults took the trouble to study the way in which adult wild animals really do behave, they would find that they are the wild animals. They are the ones who are trying to limit exploration and who are selling out to the cosiness of sub-human conservativism. Luckily for the species, there are always enough adults who retain their juvenile inventiveness and curiosity and who enable populations to progress and expand.

  When we look at young chimpanzees at play we are immediately struck by the similarity between their behaviour and that of our own children. Both are fascinated by new ‘toys’. They fall on them eagerly, lifting them, dropping them, twisting them, banging them and taking them to pieces. They both invent simple games. The intensity of their interest is as strong as ours, and during the first few years of life they do just as well – better, in fact, because their muscle system develops quicker. But after a while they begin to lose ground. Their brains are not complex enough to build on this good beginning. Their powers of concentration are weak and do not grow as their bodies grow. Above all, they lack the ability to communicate in detail with their parents about the inventive techniques they are discovering.

  The best way to clarify this difference is to take a specific example. Picture-making, or graphic exploration, is an obvious choice. As a pattern of behaviour it has been vitally important to our species for thousands of years, and we have the prehistoric remnants at Altamira and Lascaux to prove it.

  Given the opportunity and suitable materials, young chimpanzees are as excited as we are to explore the visual possibilities of making marks on a blank sheet of paper. The start of this interest has something to do with the investigation-reward principle of obtaining disproportionately large results from the expenditure of comparatively little energy. This can be seen operating in all kinds of play situations. A great deal of exaggerated effort may be put into the activities, but it is those actions that produce an unexpectedly increased feed-back that are the most satisfying. We can call this the play principle of ‘magnified reward’. Both chimps and children like banging things and it is those objects which produce the loudest noise for the smallest effort that are preferred. Balls that bounce high when only weakly thrown, balloons that shoot across a room when only lightly touched, sand that can be moulded with the mildest pressure, toys on wheels that roll easily along at the gentlest push, these are the things that have maximum play-appeal.

  When first faced with a pencil and paper the infant does not find itself in a very promising situation. The best it can do is to tap the pencil on to the surface. But this leads to a pleasant surprise. The tap does something more than simply make a noise, it produces a visual impact as well. Something comes out of the end of the pencil and leaves a mark on the paper. A line is drawn.

  It is fascinating to watch this first moment of graphic discovery by a chimpanzee or a child. It stares at the line, intrigued by the unexpected visual bonus its action has brought. After viewing the result for a moment it repeats the experiment. Sure enough, it works the second time, then again, and again. Soon the sheet is covered with scribble lines. As time passes, drawing sessions become more vigorous. Single, tentative lines, placed on the paper one after the other, give way to multiple back-and-forth scribbling. If there is a choice, crayons, chalks and paints are preferred to pencils because they have an even bolder impact, produce an even bigger visual effect, as they sweep across the paper.

  The first interest in this activity appears at about one-and-a-half years of age, in both chimps and children. But it is not until after the second birthday that the bold, confident, multiple scribbling really gains momentum. At the age of three the average child moves into a new graphic phase: it starts to simplify its confused scribbling. Out of the exciting chaos it begins to distil basic shapes. It experiments with crosses, then with circles, squares and triangles. Meandering lines are led round the page until they join up with themselves, enclosing a space. A line becomes an outline.

  During the months that follow, these simple shapes are combined, one with another, to produce simple abstract patterns. A circle is cut through by a cross, the corners of a square are joined by diagonal lines. This is the vital stage that precedes the very first pictorial representations. In the child this great break-through comes in the second half of the third year, or the beginning of the fourth. In the chimpanzee, it never comes. The young chimp manages to make fan-patterns, crosses and circles, and it can even achieve a ‘marked circle’, but it can go no further. It is particularly tantalizing that the marked-circle motif is the immediate precursor of the earliest representation produced by the typical child. What happens is that a few lines or spots are placed inside the outline of the circle and then, as if by magic, a face stares back at the infant painter. There is a sudden flash of recognition. The phase of abstract experimentation, of pattern invention, is over. Now a new goal must be reached: the goal of perfected representation. New faces are made, better faces, with the eyes and mouth in the right place. Details are added – hair, ears, a nose, arms and legs. Other images are born – flowers, houses, animals, boats, cars. These are heights the young chimp can never, it seems, attain. After the peak has been reached – the circle made and its inside area marked – the animal continues to grow but its pictures do not. Perhaps one day a genius chimp will be found, but it seems unlikely.

  For the child, the representational phase of graphic exploration now stretches out before it, but although it is the major area of discovery, the older abstract patterning influences still make themselves felt, especially between the ages of five and eight. During this period particularly attractive paintings are produced because they are based on the solid grounding of the abstract-shape phase. The representational images are still at a very simple stage of differentiation and they combine appealingly with the confident, well-established shape-and-pattern arrangements.

  The process by which the dot-filled circle grows into an accurate full-length portrait is an intriguing one. The discovery that it represents a face does not lead to an overnight success in perfecting the process. This clearly becomes the dominant aim, but it takes time (more than a decade, in fact). To start with, the basic features have to be tidied up a little – circles for eyes, a good strong horizontal line for a mouth, two dots or a central circle for a nose. Hairs have to fringe the outer circle. And there things can pause for a while. The face, after all, is the most vital and compelling part of the mother, at least in visual terms. After a while, though, further progress is made. By the simple device of making some of the hairs longer than the rest, it is possible for this face-figure to sprout arms and legs. These in turn can grow fingers and toes. At this point the basic figure-shape is still founded on the pre-representational circle. This is an old friend and he is staying late. Having become a face he has now become a face and body combined. It does not seem to worry the child at this stage that the arms of its drawing are coming out of the side of what appears to be its head. But the circle cannot hold out for ever. Like a cell, it must divide and bud off a lower, second cell. Alternatively the two leg lines must be joined somewhere along their length, but higher than the feet. In one of these two ways, a body can be born. Whichever happens, it leaves the arms high and dry, sticking out of the side of the head. And there they stay for quite some time, before they are brought down into their more correct position, protruding from the top of the body.

  It is fascinating to observe these slow steps being taken, one after the other, as the voyage of discovery tirelessly continues. Gradually more and more shapes and combinations are attempted, more diverse images, more complex colours, and more varied textures. Eventually, accurate representation is achieved and precise copies of the outside world can be trapped and preserved on paper. But at that stage the original exploratory nature of the activity becomes submerged beneath the pressing demands of pictorial communication. Earlier painting and drawing, in the young chimp and the young child, had nothing to do wi
th the act of communicating. It was an act of discovery, of invention, of testing the possibilities of graphic variability. It was ‘action-painting’, not signalling. It required no reward – it was its own reward, it was play for play’s sake. However, like so many aspects of childhood play, it soon becomes merged into other adult pursuits. Social communication makes a take-over bid for it and the original inventiveness is lost, the pure thrill of ‘taking a line for a walk’ is gone. Only in doodles do most adults allow it to re-emerge. (This does not mean that they have become uninventive, merely that the area of invention has moved on into more complex, technological spheres.)

  Fortunately for the exploratory art of painting and drawing, much more efficient technical methods of reproducing images of the environment have now been developed. Photography and its offshoots have rendered representational ‘information painting’ obsolete. This has broken the heavy chains of responsibility that have been the crippling burden of adult art for so long. Painting can now once again explore, this time in a mature adult form. And this, one need hardly mention, is precisely what it is doing today.

  I selected this particular example of exploratory behaviour because it reveals very clearly the differences between us and our nearest living relative, the chimpanzee. Similar comparisons could be made in other spheres. One or two deserve brief mention. Exploration of the world of sound can be observed in both species. Vocal invention, as we have already seen, is for some reason virtually absent in the chimpanzee, but ‘percussive drumming’ plays an important role in its life. Young chimpanzees repeatedly investigate the noise-potentials of acts of thumping, foot-stamping and clapping. As adults they develop this tendency into prolonged social drumming sessions. One animal after another stamps, screams and tears up vegetation, beating on tree-stumps and hollow logs. These communal displays may last for half an hour or more. Their exact function is unknown, but they have the effect of mutually arousing the members of a group. In our own species, drumming is also the most widespread form of musical expression. It begins early, as in the chimpanzee, when children begin to test out the percussive values of objects around them in much the same way. But whereas the adult chimpanzees never manage much more than a simple rhythmic tattoo, we elaborate it into complex poly-rhythms and augment it with vibrating rattles and pitch variations. We also make additional noises by blowing into hollow cavities and scraping or plucking pieces of metal. The screams and hoots of the chimpanzee become in us inventive chants. Our development of complicated musical performances appears, in simpler social groups, to have played much the same role as the drumming and hooting sessions of the chimpanzees, namely, mutual group arousal. Unlike picture-making, it was not an activity pattern that became commandeered for the transmission of detailed information on a major scale. The sending of messages by drumming sequences in certain cultures was an exception to this rule, but by and large music was developed as a communal mood-provoker and synchronizer. Its inventive and exploratory content became stronger and stronger, however, and, freed of any important ‘representational’ duties, it has become a major area of abstract aesthetic experimentation. (Because of its other prior information commitments, painting has only just caught up with it.)