"One of the subordinate male chimpanzees
studied by Jane Goodall at the Gombe
Stream National Park in Tanzania learned
to bang two empty kerosene cans together."
"He then used the extraordinary movement and
noise to (augment) his threat_displays and,
as a result, rose to dominance in just a few
days over larger males in the troop."
Chimpanzees have other, sometimes surprising talents. Under laboratory
conditions they can weave sticks and vines into simple patterns (but
cannot untie knots). They can classify and group objects into abstract
classes according to size and color, distinguish photographs of human
beings from those of all kinds of animals, and draw rough circles and
other elementary figures just short of representational images. When a
chimpanzee looks into a mirror he recognizes himself as something
distinct from other members of his own species. In the original test
of that capacity, the psychologist Gordon G. Gallup put spots of red
dye on the heads of chimpanzees under anesthesia and then allowed them
to see their reflections after awakening. The apes immediately
responded by touching their hand to the red spot. We may conclude that
if some habiline Narcissus ever looked into a pool of still water, he
understood that the face staring back was his own image and not that
of a second, ghostly primitive. Perhaps he also thought in some
wordless fashion: this is I, who exists apart from the clamorous band
and will someday die. Scientists, given enough time, might deduce
whether this is true and thereby have something to say about the
evolutionary history of the self and of the soul.
Biologists and psychologists alike speak of flexibility as an advanced
trait and, sure enough, chimpanzees and great apes have more varied
behavior than monkeys. When given a toy or some other novel object to
examine, they touch it with more of their body parts, hold and
manipulate it in a greater variety of ways, and are generally less
predictable in moment-to-moment responses. As a corollary, young
chimpanzees play and explore more than other animals, yet much less
than modern human children and adults. We can again assume that the
problematic habilines lay somewhere in between. Play extends the
variability of behavior mightily and opens numerous possibilities for
cultural innovation in both animals and man. John and Janice Baldwin
described a remarkable example involving a two-year-old squirrel
monkey named Corwin. Occasionally Corwin dropped food pellets, which
bounced off his cage floor. He turned the accident into a game in
which he deliberately dropped pellets and chased them as they bounced
around. One day as he was leaping upward a pellet flew out of his hand
and ricocheted through the upper part of the cage before settling to
the floor. Corwin then started to release pellets deliberately as he
jumped, making the game more complicated. Finally, he learned to toss
the pellets up into the air and catch them in his mouth.
Such antics can sometimes be turned to advantage. One of the
subordinate male chimpanzees studied by Jane Goodall at the Gombe
Stream National Park in Tanzania learned to bang two empty kerosene
cans together. He then used the extraordinary movement and noise to
augment his threat displays and, as a result, rose to dominance in
just a few days over larger males in the troop. Another, partially
crippled chimpanzee observed by Geza Teleki compensated for his lack
of mobility during hunting by dashing the head of a prey repeatedly
against tree trunks. How easy it would be to evolve to a more
humanlike behavior, to change from hitting a stick with a head to
hitting a head with a stick. The habilines or their immediate
ancestors almost certainly took this step. They inaugurated the long
and malevolent lineage of weaponry, which in its final nuclear form
could annihilate Homo and demonstrate—in a conclusive and unexpected
manner—that culture is indeed superior to heredity.
Promethean Fire - Reflections on the Origins of Mind
Charles J. Lumsdem - E.O. Wilson - 1983
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1583484256/
