“Demonic Males” and the Original Sin of the Apes

I can imagine little that it is more important for us to learn the truth about than our own nature.  If we fail to learn that truth we literally put our survival at risk.  Under the circumstances, it is all the more disturbing that we have a history of obfuscating the path to that truth with pleasant ideological myths.  We have been making progress.  One of the most pernicious, tenacious, and dangerous myths, that of the Blank Slate, seems finally to have collapsed, buried by common sense and a mountain of evidence that, in the end, became so great that it couldn’t be hand-waved away, even by the time-honored tactic of demonizing the messengers. 

Some of the most damning evidence came from primatologists, who finally began to give us accurate information on our closest animal relatives, the great apes.  Less than half a century ago, our “scientific” knowledge of their behavioral traits was a farrago of the most ridiculous fairy tales.  As recently as 1968, blank slater Ashley Montagu could write with a perfectly straight face, and without fear of contradiction,

The field studies of Schaller on the gorilla, of Goodall on the chimpanzee, of Harrison on the orang-utan, as well as those of others, show these creatures to be anything but irascible. All the field observers agree that these creatures are amiable and quite unaggressive, and there is not the least reason to suppose that man’s prehuman primate ancestors were in any way different.

Alas, in the fullness of time, the apes, too, were roused from their reverie in the Garden of Eden and shown the door.  I recommend Demonic Males by primatologists Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson to anyone who wants to read the details of how we finally discovered that they had actually been munching the forbidden apples all along.  The book was originally published in 1996, but I hadn’t actually read it until recently.  Peterson cites a blurb from Publisher’s Weekly that sums it up nicely:

Contradicting the common belief that chimpanzees in the wild are gentle creatures, Harvard anthropologist Wrangham and science writer Peterson have witnessed, since 1971, male African chimpanzees carry out rape, border raids, brutal beatings and warfare among rival territorial gangs. In a startling, beautifully written, riveting, provocative inquiry, they suggest that chimpanzee-like violence preceded and paved the way for human warfare, which would make modern humans the dazed survivors of a continuous, five-million-year habit of lethal aggression.

The books main virtue is the wealth of observations and studies it pulls together of the behavior of both apes and human hunter-gatherers.  Some excerpts:

That male orangutans regularly rape must be one of the best-kept secrets in the literature of popular zoology.

(Referring to gorillas) When a male kills her infant, the female is an established member of an existing troop, while the killer male is a stranger. If she has seen him before, it has been only during violent interactions when he challenged her mate – a patent threat to her infant, a blur of power as he rammed through the vegetation before being stopped, outfought, and repelled by the resident silverback. And now he has succeeded in his aim. He has managed to get past the defenses of her mate. He has charged directly up to her, even as she screamed and fought back, and in a terrifying show of mastery, he has torn her baby from her and killed it in an instant.

Fists can also grasp invented weapons. Chimpanzees today are close to using hand-held weapons. Throughout the continent, wild chimpanzees will tear off and throw great branches when they are angry or threatened, or they will pick up and throw rocks. Humphrey, when he was the alpha male at Gombe, almost killed me once by sending a melon-size rock whistling less than half a meter from my head. They also hit with big sticks. A celebrated film taken in Guinea shows wild chimpanzees pounding meter-long clubs down on the back of a leopard.

The latter paragraph is of particular significance in view of a remarkable taphonomic finding by South African Prof. Raymond Dart regarding the prevalence of antelope humerus bones among those taken from a cave in the Makapan Valley.  The bones, found in association with those of Australopithecus africanus, represented no less than 11% of the all the identifiable types.  They would have made ideal double headed clubs, and there was other evidence to indicate that is exactly what they were used for.  Another anomalously prevalent bone present was  the lower jaw of a small antelope that would have been ideal as a slashing or cutting tool.  Published in 1953, Dart’s masterful statistical study was “refuted” in a later work by C. K. Brain, who, not bothering to address Dart’s statistical anomalies, naively claimed that all the bones had been dragged into the cave by leopards and other large predators.  Brain has been busily publishing refutations of his “refutation” in recent years.  Apparently he realizes that others can look at the evidence for themselves and, if they do, are likely to find gaping holes in his work that they’re not quite as likely to be silent about as they might have been a couple of decades ago.  In spite of that, as far as I know he has never apologized for the damage he did to Dart’s reputation.  At the time it was published, of course, Brain’s flawed work was eagerly lapped up by blank slaters far and wide as “proof” that Dart had been wrong.  If you look around on Google, you can still find a few of their productions, most of them remarkable for the trademark pious indignation they reserve for anyone who dares to threaten their ideological certainties.  To this day, no one has ever succeeded in explaining away Dart’s statistical argument.  It has simply been ignored.  Perhaps it is time the data was revisited.

The book is thought provoking on many levels, and is one of the few recent works on innate human behavior that seriously discusses the issue of aggression, a major theme of early opponents of the blank slate like Robert Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz.  Many of them are flawed attempts to “emphasize the positive,” and cobble together new moral systems based on misguided notions of “dialing up” the level of human altruism, accommodating modern political correctness to dubious versions of innate behavior in the same way the blank slate used to accommodate Marxism.  It would be well if we could finally pull our heads out of that particular hole in the sand once and for all.

Demonic Males includes several of Wrangham’s fanciful hypotheses, such as the “bulb eating” transition from ape to man, and the notion that human warfare is the result of “pride.”  The latter is remarkable, in view of the inevitable vagueness of the term “pride,” but more importantly because Wrangham is clearly aware of and understands what seems to me (not to mention Ardrey and Lorenz) a much more likely explanation; namely ingroup-outgroup behavior, or, as Ardrey referred to it, the Amity/Enmity Complex.   The book actually includes a very interesting and quite detailed discussion of the phenomenon, with some data that I had not previously seen, all of it a seemingly compelling argument in favor of its role in warfare.  In spite of that, the author somehow managed to convince himself that warfare is all about “pride.”  “Pride,” in the sense that Wrangham uses it, is far more plausible in the context of intra-group struggles for status than as an explanation of inter-group warfare.  Regardless, it in no way detracts from the significance of the book, which is important because of the source material it makes accessible to a popular audience more than for Wrangham’s theories.

The significance of books like this is nicely summed up by Wrangham himself;

Our Pleistocene ancestors were beleaguered by their own demonic males, surely. But they didn’t have automatic rifles, fertilizer bombs, dynamite, nerve gas, Stealth bombers, or nuclear weapons. We do, and therein lies the danger.

Those words might have been taken directly from one of Ardrey’s books.  Indeed, the source material presented in Demonic Males is a triumphant vindication of Ardrey, whose core ideas were always that innate factors influence human behavior, and not all of them predispose us to be kind and inoffensive.  As a reward for being right on those fundamental truths, his legacy has been distorted beyond recognition, and his name has been nearly forgotten.  But I digress.  I will have more to say about Ardrey in later posts. 

Another interesting phenomenon is discussed at length in Demonic Males; the remarkable behavioral differences between chimpanzees and bonobos.  That, however, is also a topic for another day.

Author: Helian

I am Doug Drake, and I live in Maryland, not far from Washington, DC. I am a graduate of West Point, and I hold a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from the University of Wisconsin. My blog reflects my enduring fascination with human nature and human morality. View all posts by Helian