Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (44 page)

In most cases these actions are only symbolic. There is no intromission and no orgasm. They fake it. You wish to pay respect to a high-ranking male, but Nature has not equipped you with appropriate spoken language. Still, there are many postures and gestures in your everyday life that have a meaning readily apprehended by everyone. If females must comply with nearly every proferred sexual invitation, the sex act itself is a vivid, powerful, and unambiguous symbol of submission. Indeed, presenting is a mark of deference and respect among all the apes and monkeys, and among many other mammals as well.

The anger of a high-ranking male is fearsome. His arousal is obvious
to any bystander, because all the hair on his body is standing on end. He may charge, intimidate, and tear branches from trees. If you’re not prepared to meet him in single combat, you might want to appease him, to keep him happy. You closely monitor the slightest raising of a single one of his hairs. Not only are you perpetually compliant (“I’m yours whenever you want me”), but just for your own comfort you need frequent reassurance that he’s not angry with you. When he
is
angry, he exaggerates his size and ferocity and displays the weapons that he will bring to bear if the adversary does not submit. He uses his displays to keep more junior males in line, and they use theirs to advance within the hierarchy. Displays may serve as a response to a challenge, or just as a general reminder to the community at large that here’s someone not to be trifled with. Of course, it’s not all bluff; if it were, it wouldn’t work. There must be a credible threat of violence. A kind of menace maintenance is required. If push comes to shove there may be serious fighting. But much more often the display has a ritual and ceremonial character. (Almost always the alpha wins, and if, on occasion, he loses, that doesn’t usually mean that the hierarchy has been inverted; for that to happen, a consistent pattern of defeat is needed.)

The lesson being communicated is deterrence, pure and simple: “Cross me and you’ll have to deal with this stature, these muscles, these teeth (note my canines), this rage.” Chimpanzee strategy is encapsulated in the earliest comprehensive account we have of human military affairs, the sixth-century
B.C
. work
The Art of War
, by Sun Tzu: “The supreme act of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
³
Deterrence is
old
. And so is its prerequisite, imagination.

So law and order are maintained, and the status of the leadership preserved through the threat (and, if necessary, the reality) of violence; but also through patronage delivered to constituents, and through the widespread craving to have a hero to admire, who can tell you what to do—especially when there’s a threat from outside the group. Violence and intimidation alone would not suffice—although there may be those who enjoy being chastised and bullied, who perhaps look on it as a form of affection.

Male chimps are obsessively motivated to work their way up the dominance ladder. This involves courage, fighting ability, often size, and always real skill in ward-heeler politics. The higher his rank, the
fewer the attacks on him by other males and the more gratifying instances of deference and submission. But the higher his rank the more he will be obliged to take pains to reassure subordinates. The dominance hierarchy makes for a stable community not only because the high-ranking males break up fights among their subordinates, but also because the very existence of hierarchy, along with the genetic tradition of compliance, inhibits conflict. One powerful motivation to be high-ranking is that the top echelons often have preferential sexual access to ovulating females. As in all mammals, this behavior is mediated by testosterone and related steroid hormones. Leaving more offspring is what natural selection is about. For this reason alone, hierarchy makes evolutionary sense.

The alpha male, merely by virtue of his exalted status, stimulates the formation of cabals to depose him. A lower-ranking male may challenge the alpha by bluff, intimidation, or real combat, as a step towards reversing their relative status. Especially under crowded conditions, females can play a central role in encouraging and helping to implement coups d’état. But the alpha male is often prepared single-handedly to take on coalitions of two, three, or four opponents.

Alphas enforce authority; betas and others sometimes challenge it—not on abstract philosophical grounds, but as a means to selfish ends. We might guess that both warring inclinations are built into us too, a different balance in different people, with much depending on the social environment. The roots of tyranny and freedom trace back to long before recorded history, and are etched in our genes.

Over a period of years in a typical small chimpanzee group, half a dozen different males may become alpha in succession—because of death or illness of the dominant male, or because of challenges from below. On the other hand, an alpha male maintaining his status for a decade is not unknown either. Perhaps coincidentally, these terms of office are roughly those typical of human governments—ranging, respectively, from Italy, say, to France. Political assassination—that is, dominance combat in which the loser dies—is rare.

In combat, males are more likely to hit, kick, stomp, drag, and wrestle. Or throw stones and beat with clubs, if any are handy. Females are more likely to pull hair and scratch, and to grapple and roll. For all their baring of teeth, males rarely bite anyone in the group, because their canines can do terrible damage. They may flash the
razors and switch-blade knives, but they hardly ever draw blood. Females with much less prominent canines have fewer inhibitions. Any given fight is likely to stimulate other fights among unrelated or even nonaligned parties. One combatant may poignantly appeal for aid from passersby, who may, in any case, be attacked for no apparent reason. Any conflict seems to raise the testosterone level in all the male bystanders. Everyone’s hair stands on end. Perhaps long-standing resentments flare. General mayhem often results.

Chimps will place their fingers between the teeth of a high-ranking male and derive reassurance when the fingers are returned intact. At times of rising group tension, male chimps may touch or heft each other’s testicles, as the ancient Hebrews and Romans are said to have done upon concluding a treaty, or testifying before a tribunal. Indeed the root of “testify” and “testimony” is the Latin word,
testis
. The significance of the gesture, less common now that men wear pants, is not only transcultural, but trans-species.

——

From infancy, chimps are groomed, chiefly by their mothers. They in turn clutch their mothers’ fur from the moment of their birth. The infant revels in the physical contact, deriving deep and long-term psychological benefits from it. Even if their physical needs are attended to, monkeys and apes that, as infants, don’t receive something like hugging and grooming, grow up to be socially, emotionally, and sexually incompetent. As the infant matures, grooming behavior is slowly transferred to others. Most adults have many grooming partners. In a grooming pair, one partner mainly does, the other is mainly done to. But even the alpha will play either role. One individual will sit serenely while the other combs through its hair, rubs all its parts, and occasionally finds a parasite (a louse or a tick—maybe getting ripped on butyric acid), which it promptly eats. Sometimes the chimps hold hands the whole time. Jittery full-grown males will return to their mothers to be groomed and reassured. Males who become irritable with one another often hastily repair to mutual grooming to calm each other down. It may have been selected for long ago, as an improvement in chimp hygiene and public health, but grooming has now become a centrally important social activity, probably lowering testosterone and adrenaline titers.

The closest human counterpart may be the back rub or the body massage, which have been raised to art forms in cultures as diverse as modern Japan and Sweden, Ottoman Turkey and Republican Rome—where, in characteristic human fashion, a specialized tool, the strigil, was employed to rub the back. Gentlemen in Restoration England idled away the hours by collectively combing their wigs. Where body lice are a problem, human parents carefully and routinely go through their children’s hair. The emotional power of being groomed by the alpha male is perhaps akin to the laying-on of hands by shamans, healing ministers, chiropractors, charismatic surgeons, and kings.

Despite the importance of the male dominance hierarchy, it is by no means the only important chimp social structure, as the grooming pairs indicate. A mother and her children, or two grown siblings, have special, lifelong, mutually supportive bonds. A high-ranking son may be to a mother’s social advantage. There are also long-term relationships between unrelated individuals of the same sex that might certainly be called friendships. Largely outside the male hierarchy, there’s an intricate set of female bonds that often depend on the number and status of relatives and friends. These extrahierarchical alliances provide important means of mitigating or reordering a dominance hierarchy: If the alpha male is undefeated in one-on-one confrontation, an alliance of two or three lower-ranking males with supporting females may conceivably put him to flight. High-ranking males are known to establish alliances with promising younger males, perhaps co-opting them to prevent future putsches. Occasionally females will step in to defuse a tense encounter.

Alliances are made and broken. Loyalties shift. There is courage and devotion, perfidy and betrayal. No dedication to liberty and equality is evident in chimpanzee politics, but machinery is purring to soften the more hard-hearted tyrannies: The focus is on the balance of power. Frans de Waal writes:

In this complex, fluid social life great benefits accrue to those skilled in discerning the interests, hopes, fears, and feelings of others. The alliance strategy is opportunistic. Today’s allies may be tomorrow’s
adversaries and vice versa. The only constant is ambition and fixity of purpose. Lord Palmerston, the nineteenth-century British Prime Minister—who described his nation’s foreign policy as no permanent national alliances, only permanent national interests—would have been right at home among the chimps.

Males have special reasons to avoid permanent rivalries. In the hunt and in patrols into enemy territory, they rely on one another. Mistrust would endanger their effectiveness. They need alliances to work their way up the promotion ladder or to maintain themselves in power. So, while males are much more aggressive than females, they are also much more highly motivated toward reconciliation.

When Calhoun crowded his rats together he found a wholesale change in their behavior, almost as if their collective strategy was now to kill off enough of themselves and to lower the birth rate enough that the population in the next generation would be reduced to manageable numbers. Given all the chimp propensities that we’ve chronicled (and the fact, described in the next chapter, that baboons can go into a murderous, annihilating group frenzy when packed together), you might expect that chimps behave badly when overcrowded, as in zoos. In close confines a male chimp cannot escape from an attack, cannot lead a female into the bushes away from the controlling gaze of the alpha male, cannot enjoy the excitement of the hunt or the patrol or contact with females from adjacent territories. You might expect frustration levels to rise, and hierarchical encounters now to involve less bluff and more real combat. If you’re not ready for a fight to the death, you’d better, you might think, find some way to mollify, appease, show deference, pay your respects, perform services, be useful—and genuflect at every step so the alpha harbors no possible misgivings about whether you know your place.

Surprisingly, just the opposite is true. In zoo after zoo, males—and especially high-ranking males—exhibit a degree of measured restraint under crowded conditions that would be unthinkable if they were free. Imprisoned chimps are much more likely to share their food. Captivity somehow brings forth a more democratic spirit. When jammed together, chimps make an extra effort to get the social machinery humming. In this remarkable transformation it is the females who are the peacemakers. When, after a fight, two males are studiously ignoring one another—as if they were too proud to apologize or make up—it
is often a female who jollies them along and gets them interacting. She clears blocked channels of communication.

At the Arnhem colony in the Netherlands, every adult female was found to play a therapeutic role in communication and mediation among the petulant, rank-conscious, grudge-holding males. When real fights were about to break out and the males began to arm themselves with rocks, the females gently removed the weapons, prying their fingers open. If the males rearmed themselves, the females disarmed them again. In the resolution of disputes and the avoidance of conflict,
*
females led the way.
⁵

So, it turns out that indeed chimps are not rats: Under crowded conditions they make extraordinary efforts to be more friendly, to be slower to anger, to mediate disputes, to be polite—and the female role in calming the testosterone-besotted males is crucial. This is an important and encouraging lesson about the dangers of extrapolating behavior from one species to another, especially when they are not very closely related. Since humans are much more like chimps than like rats, we can’t help wondering what would happen if women played a role in world politics proportionate to their numbers. (We’re not talking about those occasional women Prime Ministers who have risen to the top by besting the men at their own games, but about proportional representation of women at all levels of government.)

——

Students of the chimpanzee call it “courtship.” It’s a set of ritualized gestures by which the male signals to the female his sexual intentions. But in ordinary usage courtship is a word describing a patient human attempt, over long periods of time, and often with great gentleness and subtlety, to build trust and to create the foundations for a long-term relationship. The male chimpanzee’s courtship communication is much briefer and more to the point, much closer to “Let’s fuck.” He may swagger, shake a branch, rustle some leaves, fix her with his stare, and reach out an arm toward her. His hair will be erect. And not just his hair. An erect penis—bright red, contrasting vividly with his black scrotum—is an invariable part of chimpanzee “courtship,”
which you might think is a good thing because most of the other symbolic desiderata of courtship are barely distinguishable from those used in intimidating other males. In chimpish, “Let’s fuck” sounds almost exactly like “I’m gonna kill you.” The significance of this similarity has not been lost on the females. They comply. A typical female rejection rate to an unrelated male’s sexual overture is about 3%.