The Age of Empathy (24 page)

The finding is interesting in relation to the magpie’s reputation. As a child, I learned never to leave small shiny objects, such as teaspoons, unattended outdoors since these raucous birds will steal
anything they can put their filthy beaks on. This folklore even inspired a Rossini opera,
La Gazza Ladra
(“The Thieving Magpie”). Nowadays, this view has been replaced with one more sensitive to ecological balance, in which magpies are depicted as murderous robbers of the nests of innocent songbirds. Either way, they are despised as black-and-white gangsters.

But no one has ever called a magpie stupid. For me, the big question is whether its self-recognition supports or undermines the co-emergence hypothesis. For the moment, I believe the former. Perspective-taking may be critically important for a species that plunders the nests of others and steals from humans. The capacity may be even more useful in relation to its own kind. Magpies cache food and undoubtedly steal from one another the way jays also do. This requires watching to see if you’re being watched, because if another bird has seen where you hide your food, it’s bound to disappear. This topic has been studied in jays ever since a British scientist, Nicky Clayton, observed scrub jays over lunchtime at the University of California at Davis. Clayton noticed the fierce competition for leftover scraps, which the birds would cache away from one another. Some jays went further, however, returning to rebury their treasures once their rivals had left the scene.

Follow-up research with Nathan Emery at Cambridge University led to the intriguing claim that “it takes a thief to know a thief.” Jays apparently extrapolate from their own experiences to the intentions of others, so that those who in the past have misappropriated the caches of others are especially keen on keeping the same thing from happening to themselves. Perhaps this process, too, requires the ability to parse the self from the other. As the ultimate bird thief, the magpie may have an even greater need to guess the intentions of others. Curiously, their self-recognition may therefore relate to a life of crime.

At the very least, these new insights into
la gazza ladra
offer fresh meaning to its love affair with reflective items.

Nikkie, a chimpanzee, once showed me how to manipulate attention. He had gotten used to my throwing wild berries across the moat at the zoo where I worked. One day, while I was recording data, I had totally forgotten about the berries, which hung on a row of tall bushes behind me. Nikkie hadn’t. He sat down right in front of me, locked his red-brown eyes into mine, and—once he had my attention—abruptly jerked his head and eyes away from mine to fixate with equal intensity on a point over my left shoulder. He then looked back at me and repeated the move. I may be dense compared with a chimpanzee, but the second time I turned around to see what he was looking at, and spotted the berries. Nikkie had indicated what he wanted without a single sound or hand gesture.

That simple act of communication went against an entire body of literature that links pointing to language and has therefore no room for nonlinguistic creatures. Pointing, a so-called deictic gesture, is defined as drawing another’s attention to an out-of-reach object by locating the object in space for the other. There’s obviously no point to pointing unless you understand that the other has
not
seen what you have seen, which involves realizing that not everyone has the same information. It’s yet another example of perspective-taking.

Humans point all the time, and automatically follow the pointer’s attention.

Inevitably, academics have surrounded pointing with heavy theoretical artillery. Some have focused on the typically human gesture with outstretched arm and index finger. That gesture has been linked to symbolic communication, which calls up the image of early humans walking around on the savanna, pointing and assigning words to objects: “Let’s call the animal over there a zebra, and let’s
call this here your belly button.” Yet doesn’t such a scenario imply that our ancestors understood pointing prior to the evolution of language? If so, the idea that our nonlinguistic relatives point shouldn’t upset anyone.

The first step is to move away from silly Western definitions, such as the one requiring an outstretched index finger. In our own species, too, a lot of pointing is done without the hands, and in many parts of the world hands are in fact taboo. In 2006, a major health organization advised American business travelers to refrain from finger-pointing altogether, since so many cultures consider it rude. Among Native Americans, for example, approved forms of pointing involve pursed lips, chin movements, a nod with the head, or pointing with knees, feet, or shoulders. I’ve even heard in-jokes about it, such as the hunting dog whom the white owner brought back to its Indian trainer for retraining, because the dog only knew to indicate game by puckering its lips.

Most people have felt the need to warn companions at a party that the dreaded character X has just entered the room and is heading their way. In such a situation, you don’t simply point or shout, even though those are natural inclinations. No, you raise your eyebrows at your companion, jerk your head a bit in the direction of the approaching X, and maybe clamp your lips firmly together to warn your companion to stay mum.

We should take a broad view, therefore, of what constitutes pointing. After all, we have bred dogs (called “pointers”) to freeze into a particular stance to indicate a covey of quail. Monkeys, too, often point with their whole bodies and heads when they recruit allies during fights. If monkey A threatens monkey B, B may walk over to his usual protector, C. Sitting next to C, he then looks at him, jerks his head with grunts and threats toward A, and repeats this back-and-forth many times, as if telling C: “Look at that guy—he’s bothering me!” Among macaques, an aggressor points with lifted chin and staring eyes at the opponent, in between conspicuously glancing at the ally. Among baboons, the same behavior is so repetitive and exaggerated
that fieldworkers call it “head-flagging.” The goal is to make absolutely clear to the ally where one’s adversary is.

In Emil Menzel’s classic studies of knowledge attribution, one chimp knew hidden food or danger, whereas others didn’t. The others quickly grasped whether the concealed object was attractive or frightening, and its approximate location, by watching the first chimp’s body language. Menzel considered body orientation a highly accurate indicator, especially for an observer in a tree or other high point, adding that “it is primarily a bipedal animal such as man—whose body posture is a much less accurate ‘pointer’ than the posture of a quadrupedal animal—who actually needs to extend some appendage to indicate direction precisely.”

A widely employed criterion for the intentionality of pointing is that the pointer checks the results of his actions. The pointer should make sure, by looking back and forth between the object he is pointing at and his partner, that the partner is paying attention and the pointer is not pointing for nothing. Nikkie did this by locking his eyes with mine. A number of recent experiments have investigated this issue in great apes, using manual pointing—not because this is the most natural way for them to point, but because captive apes readily learn that the gesture is most successful in getting a human response.

At the Yerkes Primate Center, David Leavens worked with chimps who regularly see people walk by. It is logical for the apes to learn how to draw attention to things they want, such as a piece of fruit that has dropped outside of their cage. This was tested systematically by placing food at certain locations. As it turns out, two-thirds of more than one hundred chimps gestured to the experimenter. A few did so by stretching out an open palm. Most, however, used the whole hand to point at a banana outside their cage, although no one had ever trained them to point this way. A few even pointed with an index finger.

There were signs that the apes monitored the effect of their gestures the same way children do. An ape would make eye contact with the human and then point while alternating its gaze between the food
and the human. One chimp, afraid to be misunderstood, pointed first with her hand at a banana and then with a finger at her mouth.

Just to illustrate how creative chimps can be, a typical incident happened to me not long ago. A young female, Liza, at the field station, grunted at me from behind the mesh and kept looking at me with shiny eyes (indicating she knew something exciting), alternating with pointed stares into the grass near my feet. I couldn’t figure out what she wanted, until she spit into the grass. From the trajectory, I noticed a small green grape. When I gave it to her, Liza ran to another spot and repeated her performance. She proved a very accurate spitter, and altogether got three rewards this way. Liza must have memorized the places where a caretaker had dropped the fruits; she then found me to do her bidding.

Additional evidence comes from what may be the most telling study of referential signaling by apes; that is, signaling with reference to external objects or events, conducted by Charles Menzel (son of Emil) at the Language Research Center of Georgia State University. Menzel let a female chimpanzee, named Panzee, watch him from her enclosure while he hid an object in the surrounding forest. When the caretakers arrived the next morning, they didn’t know what Menzel had done. Panzee recruited them by means of pointing, beckoning, panting, and calling, until they had located the item in the forest and given it to her. She was very insistent and explicit in her directions, occasionally using finger-pointing.

It’s highly unusual for apes to point things out for one another, though. Perhaps they don’t need signals as overt as the ones we employ since they are such incredibly astute readers of body language. But there do exist a few reports of manual pointing, one observed by myself in the 1970s:

Another account involves wild bonobos in dense forest, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, studied in 1989 by Spanish primatologist Jordi Sabater-Pi. One ape alerted his travel companions to the presence of hidden scientists:

In both examples, the context was entirely appropriate (the apes pointed at objects that others had failed to notice), and the behavior was accompanied by visual checking of its effects. Also, the pointing disappeared once the others had looked or walked into the indicated direction. Among our chimpanzees at the field station we have seen similar cases, one of which we captured on video: a finger-pointing female with fully stretched arm, looking almost accusatory as she aimed her gesture at a male who had just slapped her.

One difference with human pointing is that primates show this behavior so rarely, and only in relation to what they consider urgent matters, such as food or danger. Free sharing of information is unusual
among them, whereas we do it all the time. Two people may walk through a museum and draw each other’s attention to item after item while discussing ancient artifacts; a child will point at a balloon in the air to make sure her parents don’t miss it, or someone will point at my bicycle lamp at night to let me know it isn’t working. The absence of such behavior in other primates has been taken to indicate a major cognitive gap, but my own guess is that it has more to do with lack of motivation. After all, it’s hard to see why a species that points to food to get humans to fetch it couldn’t do the same with regard to inedible objects. If they don’t do so, it must be because they don’t feel like it.

But here too exceptions occur. Bonobos utter small peeps—high-pitched, brief vocalizations—when they discover something of interest. Watching bonobos at the San Diego Zoo day in and day out, I was struck by one group of juveniles, which every morning after their release went around a large grassy enclosure, emitting peeps for lots of things (that I rarely could identify), whereupon the others would hurry over to check out the indicated object. Perhaps they were drawing attention to discoveries such as insects, bird droppings, flowers, and the like. Given how the others reacted, the peeps conveyed something like “Come look at this!”