Ecological Intelligence (14 page)

Like the vervets, we, too, have learned the art of distraction. We all have our hard-luck stories and we all fall for them. We have all been conned and we all have something of the con man in us. When will we ever learn? The likely answer, especially if it involves the possibility of some form of reward, is never. And we are not shy to maximize our strong points either, to exaggerate or to put ourselves in a positive light. And as for minimizing our negative aspects, who of us is genuinely enthusiastic about displaying the photographs in our passports or on our driving licenses?

Am I being too hard or too cynical about the human animal? Perhaps I am, but I don’t want to be too soft either. If it makes us feel a little better about ourselves, let’s try to understand deception as a strategy that is often not only individually and socially expedient, but also necessary. On the other hand, let’s not confuse deception with a disregard for accountability. What is important is that we learn to become conscious of our survival strategies—why and when we are employing them. We have to put them to the test from time to time.Are they appropriate, are they acceptable, are they meaningful, and, finally, are they flexible?

E
volved to communicate information and purpose, one of the most important of the survival skills of all living creatures is language. In other words, it includes, but is not confined to, the syntax and symbols of human speech. Broadly defined, language is a system whereby different species through the communication and receiving of information coordinate their activities. When looked at a little more closely, almost everything, from mathematics, music, and landscape to dreams and spider webs, is a carrier of information. This information has to be perceived, interpreted, and, if necessary, acted upon.

Compared with other animals, the human sensory equipment is nothing to boast about. For example, when it comes to auditory perception, one very quickly discovers just how limited our range of hearing actually is. The human auditory system is receptive to sounds between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz where one hertz (Hz) is equivalent to one wave or vibration of sound in one second. Dogs can hear up to about 45,000 Hz. Cats, including the big ones, go even higher—85,000 Hz. Bats and dolphins are the likely high-frequency champions among mammals, detecting sounds as high as 100,000 Hz. But even they cannot compare with insects such as moths, which can hear sounds at 240,000 Hz. Then there is infrasound. Way below the human limit, elephants can vocalize at 8 Hz. The significance of this low-frequency communication in elephants is that these great animals can keep in touch with each other over distances up to 186 miles! No wonder these animals are scarce when the hunters are around.

For every creature capable of vocalization, the sounds they utter are likely to be one or more of the following: contact, alarm, territorial, separation, sexual, comfort, or safety calls. It is what linguist Derek Bickerton refers to as protolanguage rather than full language, where the former is primarily a communication system, with the latter having a mapping function—a means of representing the world internally. If protolanguage is primarily a system of communicating the emotions of fear, desire, anger, triumph, and so forth, then it is a language that is still very much with us. It is in the tone of our voices, the timing of our speech and our outbursts, and in that subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) phenomenon called body language. The human face, for instance, is capable of seven thousand different expressions, each a different way of communicating with others. Facial and body language accounts for an astonishing 75 percent of the information we communicate—and that’s without having said a word.

The contact calls of birds, wild dogs, and lions, for example, are as unmistakable as ours. “Here I am…where are you?” is Konrad Lorenz’s classical interpretation of the contact calls of animals. Their whoops, grunts, and twitters are no less significant than our “Hello,” “Good morning,” “It’s good to see you,” and “How are you?” “Watch out!” is the message of an alarm call in any language, and until recently it was believed that humans were the only creatures who could differentiate what it is that one needs to watch out for. Birds, for instance, were believed to have nonspecific alarm calls, but Dr. Chris Evans of MacQuarie University in Sydney challenged this perception. Querying our notions of these so-called birdbrains, his work has shown that our domestic chickens, through separate utterances, squawk the difference between raptors and ground predators. The squirrel-like suricates,
Suricata suricatta
, on the other hand, mimic the calls of eagles, jackals, and snakes to warn their companions of these particular enemies. Then there are Africa’s green monkeys, the vervets, who are known to have at least sixty different information calls, which include, as already mentioned, specific alarm calls for leopards, raptors, and snakes. The same goes for elephants. Joyce Poole, who has spent more than twenty-five years in the Amboseli National Park in Kenya studying these great animals, believes they employ up to seventy different vocalizations, many of which are subsonic and used in different con-texts. Not only that, it is believed, in the same way that we are called by our personal names, they have specific calls for specific members within their groups. Then there is the lion whose alarm calls vary from a short cough to a “huh” or a hiss. We don’t know yet, but it is likely that these separate calls could also be specific.

W
hen it comes to the language of territory and turf, the human animal compares well with our evolutionary brothers and sisters. To have one’s piece of land, territory, is an instinct, as the great novelist John Steinbeck wrote, and don’t we know it? Signs such as Trespassers will be prosecuted, Beware of dog, and This property is patrolled by armed response are not merely human inventions. We might as well be talking about lions whose territorial sprays and roars say the same thing…“This land is mine, mine, mine.” And then there are the hoops and sprays of the spotted hyena, who cries back at the lion, “Oh no…it isn’t.” Our signatures of ownership and territory are found not only on title deeds, but in the tracks we leave in and around our own households. They are the wet towels we leave lying on the bed and the scattered clothing on the floor. Is this adolescent laziness or do we unconsciously do it as a signal to show we have been there or that this room is mine, mine, mine?

Spoken language is far more than just words or sounds. It is the way that sounds and words are used that makes this form of communication the powerful survival tool that it is. Tone, rhythm, and pitch all play a vital part when it comes to the accurate communication of attitudes, needs, and circumstance. As with the human animal, lions, too, are sensitive to the significance of the graded roars, meows, growls, snarls, and grunting calls of their colleagues. Changing the volume, intensity, tempo, and tone of the call, writes Richard Estes in his informative
Behaviour Guide to African Mammals
, allows lions to express a wide range of emotions. Closer to home, the relaxed chatter of baboons and birds is not unlike the banter of the human animal, a profoundly important contact strategy of social animals, significant not only for its soothing effect but for that moment when everything suddenly goes quiet.

The language of the wild is not limited to cries and calls either. It includes a sophisticated “body” language in the form of long-lasting pheromones in pastes, excretions, secretions, and sprays—activities designed to communicate territory, rank, hormonal status, sexual readiness, and general intraspecies information. It is also a way of asking, “Where are the neighbors?” Brown hyenas,
Hyaena brunnea
, for example, exude two types of paste: a long-lasting one used for territorial marking, and a short-lasting one for passing on information to other members of the resident clan. Brown hyenas are social creatures but they forage alone, covering vast distances each night in search of carrion, pasting scent marks three to four times in every mile. This has led Dr. Gus Mills, a renowned expert on the hyenas of the Kalahari, to suspect that the short-acting paste is to inform other members of the clan that the area has already been searched for food.

C
onnected to the nasal passages but situated behind the front incisors is an active gland, common to most animals, that acts as a receptor for picking up airborne chemicals or pheromones. Through the use of this gland, they can interpret the sexual status and readiness of potential breeders. The male greater kudu,
Tragelaphus strepsiceros
, for instance, can scent the sexual pheromones of in-season females up to six miles away. Known as Jacobson’s organ, it is nonfunctioning in humans, but it has left its evolutionary imprint—it occasionally flares up in children, presenting as an inflamed cyst behind the upper two incisors. We, too, have our pheromones naturally, and in deodorants and perfumes. Backed up by evocative labels and brand names, the sexual signals are unmistakable. Human scenting and scent marking cannot be divorced from our animal origins. And as for the marking of one’s territory, what self-respecting male, not without a sigh of satisfaction, does not enjoy the occasional marking of his own garden in the old-fashioned way? Our territorial signatures are everywhere, from our homes and gardens to the graffiti on subway walls and in the passive aggression of litter.

P
lants, too, have their language—their way of saying yes and no, and they do it in a measurable way. An example of this is the chemical communication between Africa’s great thorn trees, the acacias, and the animals that feed on them. In response to the mealtime assault, the acacias, by pushing tannic acid from the stems into the leaves, quickly elevate the tannin levels in the foliage to unpalatable proportions. This gives animals such as giraffes and kudu about ten to twenty minutes to make the most of their leafy meal, after which they have to move on. But there is more. The tannin warning is not limited to the animal browsers alone. The same tannins have a pheromone component that is carried downwind, informing other acacias of the impending assault, thus stimulating tannin secretions into the leaves of the unbrowsed trees.

The acacias, like the animals that feed on them, also keep in touch with each other and the reason is the same—survival. But what about the survival of the giraffes and the kudu? It should not be surprising to know that these animals have learned not only to spread themselves out while they are foraging but also to browse upwind.

T
hen there is speech, the gift or talent we would surely regard as that which most distinguishes us not only from the rest of the animal kingdom but also from our hominid forefathers. Our spoken language deserves a rethink, for it involves a lot more than the development of an athletic tongue. The evolution of two asymmetrical hemispheres, with one of them, usually the left hemisphere (in 80 to 90 percent of us), housing the all-important integrating and executive centers for human speech. It has been a major milestone in our evolution. It has been as crucial for our survival as a species as was the harnessing of fire. Our earliest words, sentences, and then our stories, became the kindling that kept the early fires of human consciousness alive. Bickerton might agree with this, for he goes as far as to say that it is language, because it dominates all aspects of human cerebral function, rather than intelligence, that defines
Homo sapiens
.

Through spoken language we can articulate memories, we can announce the signs of the times, we can speak our thoughts, and more—we can conceptualize and talk
about
things. It is an ego skill that functions not as some kind of neuroanatomical switch that can be turned on and off, but rather it is a widespread, cerebral system involved in the processing, organizing, and imparting of information, both external and internal. According to many psychologists, one’s true sense of individuality would not have developed in the absence of a spoken language. Inherent in the noun-verb structure of our speech comes the inevitable differentiation between the subject and the object and, with it, the reinforcing of “I,” “me,” and “you.” Indeed, says British neuropsychiatrist T. J. Crow, who believes that schizophrenia worldwide is associated with impaired hemispheric dominance for speech, “it is difficult to imagine that an individual could contemplate the world, develop ideas, delusional or otherwise, or the capacity for rational thought, without language.”

The sheer depth of our vocabulary and the capacity to use it has set us apart from our hominid ancestors. Hungry for news and information about our world, speech has sharpened our intellect. Its role in human relationships cannot be underestimated, for we bond, we gossip, and we groom each other with words. To hear one’s language and dialect in a foreign country is to feel a surge of soul. It is a home-coming. And yet, words are a part of our undoing, for they can have a cutting edge. Sometimes we wound each other with words: we talk too much, and we say things we do not mean.

And then there is the poem “Echo” from
Wild Gifts
that seeks the I and thou of coexistence…

When we listen to the wind, the streams, and the calls of the birds and animals, our spoken language with its vowels, consonants, and syllables can easily be appreciated as a deeply rooted harnessing of the clicks, the calls, the cries, the groans, and the breath sounds of the wild. Sadly, we have forgotten the origins of our wild tongue. We have forgotten that every time we speak, our wild history is on show and that the alphabet—the building blocks of written language and with it, the capacity to read and write—is a gift from the forests, the sea, and the animals. Even reading and writing can be seen as a sophisticated form of the ancient “writing” and reading of tracks.