Joe Gores - Menaced Assassin

“The basic orang social unit is blood-related females who stay together in a single area. Once a young male is driven away from the band, he rapes any female he runs across. It is true rape, by the way-she is not ready to receive him.

“When he is full grown, he seeks females who are receptive, mates with them, and then leaves. He is solitary and his relationship with all other males is antagonistic: meeting, they invariably fight until somebody backs down or is seriously hurt.

“Gorillas, in their mountain habitats in Central Africa, are different: they travel in fairly stable social groups of females and infants led by a dominant ‘silverback’ male. Most imam ture males, as they mature, are driven off as the young male orang is. The young gorilla loner also will grab any females he can find, but his intent is very different. He keeps them to form his own harem-thus establishing a new basic social group.

“Big daddy silverback defends his harem against such seducers with violent displays in over 75 percent of the encounters, with actual physical battle 50 percent of the time. He must, because a low-ranking female often will run off with one of these traveling salesmen: in his new harem she will have the status she lacked in the old.

“Chimps and gorillas have a shared morphology that suggests species closeness; the complexities connected with knuckle-walking are even more compelling. Nobody but chimps and gorillas do it, and both species do it exactly the same. So… a shared common ancestor well after the human line had split off?

“Not so, says DNA-structuring and amino-acid analysis: almost identical human/chimp DNA suggests their split was only about 5.5 m.y. ago, while our single ape fossil from the Samburu Hills suggests the gorilla split off 6 to 9 m.y. ago.

“The basis of chimpanzee society is a male kin-group with one or more alpha males; it is the females who are the strangers. If the band splits up, there is no bond among the females; they disperse until they find new male bands. And they mate with as many of the males in their community as they can so the males, never knowing if they are the father of any given infant, will usually be solicitous of all.

“Chimps live mainly on fruit, so they have to travel in small bands of four to eight because the availability of ripe fruit dictates how often they get together. Separation can be for several weeks, and upon remeeting they have elaborate reunion reactions-hugs, kisses, back-slapping… sound familiar?

“Nobody can see anything much in a rain forest, so basic communication is by the so-called pant-hoots PBS specials have made so familiar to most of us. Every voice is unique-chimps can recognize each other over long distances of for est. These calls are usually territorial or to announce a major food source.

“Males travel with other males, aggressive to protect against aggression. They view their environment as hostile and patrol the peripheries of their territory in stealth and in numbers, always ready for war.

“So here we are at long last, at the edge of the trees with the chimps and the direct hominid forerunner of Lucy whom many anthropologists picture as a timid plant-eater forced from the trees by bad weather and bad neighbors. Sure, the Pliocene was dry after the wet Miocene, and the forests were shrinking; but anthropologist Owen Lovejoy targets bipedalism as an absolutely enormous anatomical change, one not for the faint-hearted.

“So was it the weak, or the strong, who crept down out of trees into the unknown-and survived? Common sense gives us the answer. For those who don’t believe in common sense, the chimpanzee is here as a prime source about our earlier selves, because he is so close to us, and because he obviously has changed less than we since we shared the edge of the savannah.

“Only a third of a century ago, Robert Ardrey could write with a straight face: ‘Every modern primate, whether gorilla or macaque, chimpanzee or vervet monkeys or gibbon or baboon, is inoffensive, non-aggressive, and strays no further from the vegetarian way than an occasional taste for insects.’

“Ardrey was wrong about the chimps. The chimp, so close genetically to man, is a hunting ape, the only hunting ape apart from ourselves. He does it for fun, not necessity; for pleasure, not for profit. He does not need the protein supplement to his diet to survive. So, why hunt?”

Will drank water, and Dante realized with a start that he had been so caught up in the story that he had again forgotten his central function of looking out for danger. Of being constantly alert like a chimp patrolling the perimeter of his territory. This lecture hall, right now, was Dante’s territory. He had better be ready to defend it against Raptor.

“Bloodlust? Dudley Young believes, and I agree, that the chimp’s hunting is at once something much simpler and much more profound. He hunts for the hell of it. Because it is fun, because it wards off boredom. That chimps get bored and hatch convoluted political and domestic plots within the troop is well known. That they are clever is undisputed: given an electronic board in place of their unevolved vocal apparatus, some chimps use large vocabularies, even create simple sentences.

“Is his hunting behavior shocking? Probably, when we consider that he is the brainiest and most affectionate, and the closest to us of all the primates. Certainly his behavior on hunting forays is decidedly at odds with the way he lives the rest of his life-which in my fieldwork I have found to be subtle, complex, even touched with a sort of refinement.

“Yet hunting troops seem to hunt twice a month, usually successfully. ‘Success’ is relative: the killing is inelegant at best. They kill infants often snatched literally from the mothers’ arms. About half the kills are monkeys, the rest infant baboons, baby bushbuck, squealing bushpiglets.

“They bite their victims on the head or neck, they flail them to death on rocks, they stomp them to death, they dismember them, they disembowel them. Eaten first is blood, then brains, if the skull can be cracked open so they can be swabbed out with finger or leaf. Next, viscera, flesh-all is fought over, and there are politics involved. Though male chimps are tremendously more aggressive than females, the females are surprisingly keen and vicious hunters, vociferous in their demands for their fair share of the spoils.

“Indeed, these hunts cause a veritable contagion of aggression-biting, screaming, crapping, mounting, groveling, embracing… Young likens it to the Dionysian frenzy. As if the chimps know they are doing something forbidden, almost shameful. Schizophrenic, Dr. Jekyll one minute, Mr. Hyde the next. Their brains, biologists tell us, are neither large enough nor complex enough to hold such concepts; yet anyone who has ever loved a dog knows that dogs understand all about shame and forbidden acts-with a brain a lot smaller than a chimp’s.

“While there is violence in the other primates’ lives, it is genetically ordained and ritually contained; in the chimp during his hunting forays it is not. Why is the chimp so different? Why is his violent behavior so out of control?

“Because he has no genetic or ritual guides to curb his hunting behavior, and, like us, is not physically designed for it. No claws, canines not a whole lot better than ours, and, most importantly, he is not au fond a predator like lions, leopards, wild dogs or hyenas. So he carries no genetic imprint of how to do it.

“Predators hunt for a living. There is certainly enjoyment in a good stalk; there is no anger at a failed one. Disappointment, perhaps, but not rage. It is their profession, after all. Chimps gather fruit for a living. It is an orderly and ordered activity without loss of control, though there might be a scuffle or two over some choice fig or banana.