Sex at Dawn полностью

The mounds of deliciously smelly fruit locked in reinforced concrete boxes opened only for timed, regular feedings altered the chimps’ behavior dramatically. Goodall’s assistants had to keep rebuilding the boxes, as the frustrated apes found endless ways of prying or smashing them open. Ripe fruit that could not be eaten immediately was a new experience for them—one that left the chimps confused and enraged. Imagine telling a room of unruly three-year-olds on Christmas morning (each with the strength of four adult men) that they’ll have to wait an unspecified amount of time to open the piles of presents they can see right there, under the tree.

Recalling this period a few years later, Goodall wrote, “The constant feeding was having a marked effect upon the behaviour of the chimps. They were beginning to move about in large groups more often than they had ever done in the old days. They were sleeping near camp and arriving in noisy hordes early in the morning. Worst of all, the adult males were becoming increasingly aggressive. . Not only was there a great deal more fighting than ever before, but many of the chimps were hanging around camp for hours and hours every day [emphasis added].”¹⁷

Margaret Power’s doubts concerning Goodall’s provisioning of the chimps have been largely left unaddressed by most primatologists, not just Wrangham.¹⁸ Michael Ghiglieri, for example, went to study the chimps in Kibale Forest in nearby Uganda specifically in response to the notion that the intergroup conflict Goodall’s team had witnessed might have been due to the distorting effects of those banana boxes. Ghiglieri writes, “My mission ... [was] to find out whether these warlike killings were normal or an artifact of the researchers having provisioned the chimps with food to observe them.”¹⁹ But somehow Margaret Power’s name doesn’t even appear in the index of Ghiglieri’s book, published eight years after hers.

We lack the space to adequately explore the questions Power raised, or to address subsequent reports of intergroup conflict amon₂₀some (but not all) unprovisioned chimps in other study areas. ⁰ While we’ve got our doubts about the motivations of

Pinker and Chagnon (see below), like Margaret Power, we have none about Jane Goodall’s intentions or scientific integrity. Still, with all due respect to Goodall, Power’s questions deserve consideration by anyone seriously interested in the debate over the possible primate origins of warfare.

Margaret Power’s questions cut to the heart of the matter: why fight if there’s nothing worth fighting over? Before the scientists started provisioning the apes, food appeared throughout the jungle, so the chimps spread out in search of something to eat each day. Chimps often call out to the others when they find a fruiting tree; mutual aid helps everyone, and feeding in the forest isn’t a zero-sum endeavor. But once they learned that there would be a limited amount of easy food available in the same place each day, more and more chimps started arriving in aggressive, “noisy hordes” and “hanging around.” Soon after, Goodall and her students began witnessing the now-famous “warfare” between chimp groups.

Perhaps for the first time ever, the chimps had something worth fighting over: a concentrated, reliable, yet limited source of food. Suddenly, they lived in a zero-sum world.

Applying this same reasoning to human societies, we’re left wondering why immediate-return hunter-gatherers would risk their lives to fight wars. Over what, exactly? Food? That’s spread out in the environment. Societies indigenous to areas where food is concentrated by natural conditions, like the periodic salmon runs of the Pacific Northwest of the United States and Canada, tend not to be immediate-return hunter-gatherers. We’re more likely to find complex, hierarchical societies like the Kwakiutl (discussed later) in such spots. Possessions? Foragers have few possessions of any nonsentimental value. Land? Our ancestors evolved on a planet nearly empty of human beings for the vast majority of our existence as a species. Women? Possibly, but this claim presumes that population growth was important to foragers and that women were commodities to be fought over and traded like the livestock of pastoralists. It’s likely that keeping population stable was more important to foragers than expanding it. As we’ve seen, when a group reaches a certain number of people, it tends to split into smaller groups anyway, and there is no inherent advantage in having more people to feed in band-level societies. We’ve also seen that women and men would have been free to move among different bands in the fission-fusion social system typical of hunter-gatherers, chimps, and bonobos.