Sex at Dawn полностью

In 2007, David Livingstone Smith, author of The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War, published an essay exploring the evolutionary argument that war is rooted in our primate past. In his grisly accounts of chimps pummeling one another to a bloody pulp and eating each other alive, Smith repeatedly refers to them as “our closest non-human relative.” You’d never know from reading his essay that we have an equally close nonhuman relative. The bonobo was left strangely—if typically—unmentioned.¹³

Amid the macho posturing about the brutal implications of chimpanzee violence, doesn’t the equally relevant, nonwarring bonobo rate a mention, at least? Why all the yelling about yang with nary a whisper of yin? All darkness and no light may get audiences excited, but it can’t illuminate them. This oops-forgot-to-mention-the-bonobo technique is distressingly common in the literature on the ancient origins of war.

But the bonobo’s conspicuous absence is notable not just in discussions of war. Look for the missing bonobo wherever someone claims an ancient pedigree for human male violence of any sort. See if you can find the bonobo in this account of the origins of rape, from The DarkSide of Man: “Men did not invent rape. Instead, they very likely inherited rape behavior from our ape ancestral lineage. Rape is a standard male reproductive strategy and likely has been one for millions of years. Male humans, chimpanzees, and orangutans routinely rape females. Wild gorillas violently abduct females to mate with them. Captive gorillas also rape females.”¹⁴ (Emphasis is in the original.)

Leaving aside the complications of defining rape in nonhuman species unable to communicate their experiences and motivations, rape—along with infanticide, war, and murder—has never been witnessed among bonobos in several decades of observation. Not in the wild. Not in the zoo. Never.

Doesn’t that warrant a footnote, even?

Even apart from doubts raised by bonobos, there are serious questions worth asking about the nature of chimp “warfare.” In the 1970s, Richard Wrangham was a graduate student studying the relation between food supply and chimp behavior at Jane Goodall’s research center at Gombe, Tanzania. In 1991, five years before Wrangham and Peterson’s Demonic Males came out, Margaret Power published a carefully researched book, The Egalitarians: Human and Chimpanzee, that asked important questions concerning some of Goodall’s research on chimpanzees (without, it must be said, ever expressing anything but admiration for Goodall’s scientific integrity and intentions). But Power’s name and her doubts are nowhere to be found in Demonic Males.

Power noticed that data Goodall collected in her first years at Gombe (from 1961 to 1965) painted a different picture of chimpanzee social interaction than the accounts of chimpanzee warfare she and her colleagues published to global acclaim a few years later. Observations from those first four years at Gombe had left Goodall with the impression that the chimps were “far more peaceable than humans.” She saw no evidence of “war” between groups and only sporadic outbreaks of violence between individuals.

These initial impressions of overall primate peace mesh with research published four decades later, in 2002, by primatologists Robert Sussman and Paul Garber, who conducted a comprehensive review of the scientific literature on social behavior in primates. After reviewing more than eighty studies of how various primates spend their waking hours, they found that “in almost all species across the board, from diurnal lemurs—the most primitive primates—to apes ... usually less than 5 percent of their day is spent in any active social behavior whatsoever.” Sussman and Garber found that “usually less than 1 percent of their day is spent fighting or competing, and it’s unusually much less than 1 percent.” They found cooperative, affiliative behavior like playing and grooming to be ten to twenty times more common than conflict in all primate species.¹⁵

But Goodall’s impression of relative harmony was to change—not coincidentally, argues Power—precisely when she and her students began giving the chimps hundreds of bananas every day, to entice them to hang around the camp so they could be observed more easily.

In the wild, chimps spread out to search for food individually or in small groups. Because the food is scattered throughout the jungle, competition is unusual. But, as Frans de Waal explains, “as soon as humans start providing food, even in the jungle, the peace is quickly disturbed.”¹⁶