THE HUMAN STORY: A New History of Mankind’s Evolution
by Robin Dunbar
Faber £12.99 pp216 SO YOU THINK YOU’RE HUMAN?
by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
OUP £14.99 pp202
What sets us apart from monkeys and apes? Is there a point in evolution where we can say “That’s when we started to be human”? Robin Dunbar comes at these questions fizzing with recent research and new theories. We now know that we share 98.5% of our DNA with chimpanzees, which makes them virtually a sister species, or, put another way, makes us look like “chimpanzees gone mad”. Nearly all our distinctively human attributes have turned out to be illusions. We once thought that only humans walked on two feet, but tracks of bipedal apes, preserved in volcanic lava, were found in Tanzania in 1979. We once thought our big brains unique, but fossil evidence shows that the lumbering, doomed Neanderthals had bigger ones.
The belief that only humans use tools is also defunct. Chimps use stones to crack nuts, and twigs to fish termites from their nests. Admittedly, they are slow learners. It takes them 10 years to master nut-cracking. All the same, the fact that they use tools at all removes the vital distinction between them and us. What’s more, they have culture. Different communities of chimps develop slightly different ways of using their stones and twigs, which shows they have the capacity to invent and adapt that, greatly magnified, builds skyscrapers and space-stations. Human engineers are chimps, only more so. So too with language. Granted, human language seems unmatchably complex. But chimps, like many other species, communicate among themselves, and since we cannot get inside their heads we have no way of judging the range or subtlety of their conversation.
Dunbar’s own theory is that human language evolved from another chimp habit. They spend much of their time in mutual grooming, which bonds their communities, and our social chat is arguably just an extension of this. Speech developed because, as human groups grew larger, grooming became impractical. Language is grooming at a distance. Laughter and music — humming, singing — may, Dunbar thinks, have evolved as grooming-substitutes long before language. Both laughter and music release endorphins, the brain’s painkillers, which is what grooming does in primates.
Even the tendency to massacre creatures of one’s own kind can no longer be claimed as uniquely human. The scientific community was shocked in the 1980s when the males of a community of chimps on the shores of Lake Tanganyika launched a series of raids on the territory of a neighbouring community, eventually killing all six males. Such behaviour had never been seen before in any species of primate. Chimps had been thought to live in peaceful innocence. Six dead chimps is, of course, a paltry achievement compared to our human genocides, but it is a start.
Only two activities, Dunbar eventually decides, distinguish humans from chimps. One is mentalising, or imagining how someone else’s mind works. Without this you cannot make up stories to amuse them, so you cannot develop literature. Nor can you lie, flatter or deceive. Actually the latest ingenious experiments carried out on chimps, which Dunbar details, suggest that they may have primitive mentalising. But the idea that another individual could possess different beliefs from one’ s own is beyond them. Admittedly, many humans find it difficult to grasp, too. The other uniquely human attribute is make-believe, or the ability to engage with an imaginary world that is not physically present. It is this that allows us to dream up utopias and paradises — ideal worlds where life would be better. It has also allowed us to invent religion, which every human tribe ever encountered has in some form, but no other species shows the least interest in. This may be connected with our knowledge of impending death, which animals (so we think) do not have.
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto covers much the same ground as Dunbar, but necessarily at second-hand, since he is not a primatologist but a historian. He occasionally reminds one of the 19th- century Oxford classicist’s wife who witheringly informed a distinguished visiting scientist that any Oxford classicist could get up science in a fortnight, if only he could spare the time. The experts have failed to see numerous truths that are blindingly obvious to Fernandez-Armesto. We can be sure, he tells us, that many non-human animals have “powers of imagination similar to our own”, as well as “similar minds, emotions and ethical capacities”. Since all distinctions between humans and animals are “feeble and arbitrary”, he welcomes as “perfectly reasonable” the demand of some extreme animal-rights campaigners that the boundaries of the genus Homo should be extended to include chimpanzees.
In fact this re-labelling would achieve nothing beyond ridding the world of chimpanzees, and replacing them with an equal number of desperately handicapped humans. The notion that calling chimps human could save them from cruelty and exploitation suggests a very imperfect knowledge of how humans treat one another.
Fernandez-Armesto differs from Dunbar in that he writes as an avowed Christian, believing that man is God’s “chosen species”, created in his image. Presumably this means that the difference between man and the other animals seems less feeble and arbitrary to God than it does to Fernandez-Armesto. Since at least the time of Aquinas the church has taught that only humans have immortal souls. Animals do not. If that is so, there is an insuperable and eternal barrier between man and other creatures. Whether Fernandez-Armesto believes this is not clear. He says apes have a “divine spark”, but that may not be the same as a soul. The best parts of his book are, expectably, historical. He traces ideas of humanness from earliest times, concluding that the debate about whether humans are different from animals has gone on non-stop throughout all the main Eurasian civilisations. So it is not surprising we are still having it, and still disagree about who is human. Fernandez-Armesto points to the legalisation of abortion, and the “immolation” of human embryos for scientific research, both of them practices that allocate unborn babies to a non-human category.
Like Dunbar, he thinks only humans have religion. But whereas Dunbar treats it as an invention, dating back, on archeological evidence, no more than 200,000 years, Fernandez-Armesto believes that a sense of ourselves as spiritual was “probably one of our ancestors’ first thoughts”. If science and materialism kill it off, he fears, our descendants may no longer be human. Neither he nor Dunbar raise the question of what makes us inhuman which, given the current state of the world, seems a more urgent issue than what makes us human. Unfortunately the answer to the two questions seems to be the same. The ability to imagine a better world has led to the matchless diversification of human cultures, and prompted the alterations to our natural environment that we call civilisation. But it has also set us at one another’s throats. The two sides in every battle, the perpetrators of every atrocity, think the world will be a better place once they have finished the killing. Just get rid of the Jews or the Tutsis or the Catholics or the Protestants, and utopia will dawn. Carnage and creating paradise are identical twins.
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