Our Inner Ape by Frans de Waal

Author:Frans de Waal
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2005-01-20T21:00:00+00:00

MINGLING AT THE BORDER

Does the fact that one of our closest relatives kills its neighbors mean that, as a recent documentary put it, “warfare is in our DNA”? This makes it sound as if we are destined to be a warring people forever. But even ants, which definitely have warlike DNA, are not violent as long as they have plenty of space and food. What would be the point? It’s only when one colony’s interests collide with those of another that such behavior makes sense. War is not an insuppressible urge. It is an option.

Nevertheless, it cannot be coincidental that the only animals in which gangs of males expand their territory by deliberately exterminating neighboring males happen to be humans and chimpanzees. What is the chance of such tendencies evolving independently in two closely related mammals? The human pattern most similar to that of the apes is known as “lethal raiding.” Raids consist of a group of men launching a surprise attack when they have the upper hand, hence when there’s little chance that they will suffer themselves. The goal is to kill other men and abduct women and girls. Like the territorial violence among chimpanzees, human raids are not exactly acts of bravery. Surprise, trickery, ambush, and the avoidance of daylight are favored tactics. The majority of hunter-gatherer societies follow this pattern, waging war every couple of years.

But does the prevalence of lethal raiding imply, as stated by Richard Wrangham, that “chimpanzee-like violence preceded and paved the way for human war, making modern humans the dazed survivors of a continuous, five-million-year habit of lethal aggression”? The problem word here is not “dazed,” which is mere hyperbole, but “continuous.” For this to be true, our earliest ancestor would need to have been chimpanzeelike and we must have been on the warpath ever since. There is no evidence for either assumption. First, since the split between humans and apes, apes have undergone their own evolution. No one knows what happened during those five to six million years. Due to poor fossilization in forests, our record of ape ancestry is sketchy. The last common ancestor of humans and apes may have been gorillalike, chimpanzee-like, bonobolike, or different from any living species. Not too different, of course, but we certainly have no proof that this ancestor was a warmongering chimpanzee. And it’s good to keep in mind that only a handful of chimp populations have been studied, and not all of them are equally aggressive.

Second, who says that our ancestors were as brutal as we are today? Archeological signs of warfare (protective walls around dwellings, graveyards with weapons embedded in skeletons, depictions of warriors) go back only ten to fifteen thousand years. In the eyes of the evolutionary biologist, this is recent history. On the other hand, it’s hard to believe that war appeared out of nowhere without previous hostilities between human groups. Some proclivity must have existed. Most likely, territorial aggression was always a potential, but one exercised on a small scale only, perhaps until man settled down and began to accumulate possessions.

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