Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts • London, England 2009
Copyright © 2009 by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
all rights reserved
1 Apes on a Plane 1
Notes 297
References 341
Acknowledgments 403
Index 406
1
Ap es on a Pl ane
However selfish . . . man may be supposed, there are evidently some
principles in his nature which interest him in the fortunes of others.
APES ON A PLANE 3
cally attack a stranger, and face-to-face killings are a much harder sell for
humans than for chimpanzees. With 1.6 billion airline passengers annu-
ally compressed and manhandled, no dismemberments have been re-
ported yet. The goal of this book will be to explain the early origins of
the mutual understanding, giving impulses, mind reading, and other hy-
persocial tendencies that make this possible.
“ W IRED ” T O C OOPERA T E
From a tender age and without special training, modern humans iden-
tify with the plights of others and, without being asked, volunteer to
help and share, even with strangers. In these respects, our line of apes is
in a class by itself. Think back to the tsunami in Indonesia or to hurri-
cane Katrina. Confronted with images of the victims, donor after donor
offered the same reason for giving: Helping was the only thing that made
them feel better. People had a gut-level response to seeing anguished
faces and hearing moaning recitals of survivors who had lost family
members—wrenching cues broadcast around the world. This ability to
identify with others and vicariously experience their suffering is not sim-
ply learned: It is part of us. Neuroscientists using brain scans to monitor
neural activity in people asked to watch someone else do something like
eating an apple, or asked just to imagine someone else eating an apple,
find that the areas of the brain responsible for distinguishing ourselves
from others are activated, as are areas of the brain actually responsible
for controlling the muscles relevant to apple-eating. Tests in which peo-
ple are requested to imagine others in an emotional situation produce
similar results.4 It is a quirk of mind that serves humans well in all sorts
of social circumstances, not just acts of compassion but also hospitality,
gift-giving, and good manners—norms that no culture is without.
Reflexively altruistic impulses are consistent with findings by neuro-
scientists who use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to monitor brain
activity among experimentally paired strangers engaged in a variant of a
famous game known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In this situation, two
players earn rewards either by cooperating or defecting. If neither player
defects and both continue to cooperate over sequential games, both gain
more than they would have without playing at all. But if one player opts
out while his partner cooperates, the defector wins even more and his
partner gets nothing. If both defect, they lose out entirely. Such experi-
ments yield a remarkable result. Even when players are told by the experi-
menters that this is going to be a one-shot game, so that each player has
only one chance to cooperate or defect, with no possibility of cooperat-
ing again to mutual advantage, 42 percent of randomly selected strang-
ers nevertheless opt to behave cooperatively.5
Such generosity at first seems irrational, especially to economists
who are accustomed to celebrating individualism and economic models
that assume self-interested “rational actors,” or to a sociobiologist like
me who has devoted much of her professional life researching competi-
tion between primate males for access to fertile females, between females
in the same group for resources, and even between offspring in the same
family for access to nourishment and care. When considered in the con-
text of how humankind managed to survive vast stretches of time and
dramatic fluctuations in climate during the Pleistocene, in the period
from around 1.8 million years ago until about 12,000 BCE, such gener-
ous tendencies turn out to be “better than rational” because people had
to rely so much on time-tested relationships with others.6
APES ON A PLANE 5
Among people living in small, widely dispersed bands of intercon-
nected families likely to interact again and again, prosocial impulses—
meaning tendencies to voluntarily do things that benefit others—are
likely to be reciprocated or rewarded. The generous person’s well-being
and that of his or her family depended more on maintaining the web
of social relationships that sustained them through good times and bad
than on the immediate outcome of a particular transaction. The people
you treat generously this year, with the loan of a tool or gift of food,
are the same people you depend on next year when your waterholes dry
up or game in your home range disappears.7 Over their lifetimes people
would encounter and re-encounter their neighbors, not necessarily of-
ten, but again and again. Failures to reciprocate would result in loss of
allies or, worse still, social exclusion.8
Jump ahead thousands of years to the laboratories where researchers
administer such experiments today. As shown by research subjects who
cooperate even when there is no possibility for the favor to be recipro-
cated, “one-shot deals” are not an eventuality that human brains were
designed to register. Right from an early age, even before they can talk,
people find that helping others is inherently rewarding, and they learn to
be sensitive to who is helpful and who is not.9 Regions of the brain acti-
vated by helping are the same as those activated when people process
other pleasurable rewards.10
Anyone who assumes that babies are just little egotists who enter
the world needing to be socialized so they can learn to care about others
and become good citizens is overlooking other propensities every bit
as species-typical. Humans are born predisposed to care how they relate
to others. A growing body of research is persuading neuroscientists that
Baruch Spinoza’s seventeenth-century proposal better captures the full
range of tensions humans grow up with. “The endeavor to live in a shared,
peaceful agreement with others is an extension of the endeavor to pre-
serve oneself.” Emerging evidence is drawing psychologists and econo-
mists alike to conclude that “our brains are wired to cooperate with oth-
ers” as well as to reward or punish others for mutual cooperation.11
Perhaps not surprisingly, helpful urges are activated most readily
when people deal with each other face-to-face. Specialized regions of the
human brain, huge areas of the frontal and parietotemporal cortex, are
given over to interpreting other people’s vocalizations and facial expres-
Time and again, anthropologists have drawn lines in the sand dividing
humans from other animals, only to see new discoveries blur the bound-
aries. We drew up these lists of uniquely human attributes without real-
APES ON A PLANE 7
izing how much more they revealed about our ignorance of other ani-
mals than about the special attributes of our species. By the middle of
the twentieth century, Man the Toolmaker had lost pride of place as Jap-
anese and British researchers watched wild chimpanzees tailor twigs to
fish for termites.17 By now, every one of the Great Apes is known to se-
lect, prepare, and use tools, crafting natural objects into sponges, um-
brellas, nutcrackers—even sharpening sticks for jabbing prey.18 Further-
more, Great Apes have unquestionably been using tools for a long time.
Archaeologists trace the special stone mortars that chimpanzees in west
Africa use for nut cracking back in time at least 4,300 years.19
Great Apes employ tools in a wide range of contexts, and do so spon-
taneously, inventively, and sometimes with apparent foresight. In a re-
cent article in Science magazine titled “Apes Save Tools for Future Use,”
Nicholas Mulcahy and Josep Call describe orangutan and bonobo sub-
jects who were trained to use particular tools to solve a problem and earn
a reward, and then were permitted to select particular tools to bring with
them for tasks they would be asked to perform an hour later. They chose
the tools likely to be most useful. Such experiments have led primatolo-
gists (and even comparative psychologists working with smart birds like
corvids) to credit nonhuman animals with some ability to plan ahead.20
Arguably, Great Apes have been making and using tools since they
last shared common ancestors with humans and with each other, and
they transmitted this technological expertise along with various behav-
iors (like grooming protocol or greeting ceremonies) from one genera-
tion to another so that different populations have different repertories.
Other apes also store memories much as we do, and in terms of spatial
cognition or traits such as their ability to remember ordered symbols
that briefly flash up on a computer screen, specially trained chimpanzees
test better than graduate students.21 In general, the basic cognitive ma-
chinery for dealing with their physical worlds is remarkably similar in
humans and other apes.22
What about locomotion as the distinguishing trait? A key criterion
of humanness, upright walking on two legs, bit the dust with the discov-
ery of a fossilized trail of bipedal footprints left in volcano ash by aus-
tralopithecines—apes with brains no bigger than a chimpanzee’s—some
four million years ago. Fossilized footprints together with fossilized
skeletal remains made it clear that these long-armed, small-brained, ex-
APES ON A PLANE 9
mans, for example, can fan out around an encampment, gather building
materials, consciously register the mental blueprint someone else has in
mind, and chip in to help construct a shelter.
Humans “are the world’s experts at mind reading,” far more “bio-
logically adapted” to collaborate with others than any other ape, Toma-
sello stresses. To him, these aptitudes are nearly synonymous with our
special ability to perceive what others know, intend, and desire.27 Human
infants are not just social creatures, as other primates are; they are “ultra-
social.”28 Unlike chimpanzees and other apes, almost all humans are nat-
urally eager to collaborate with others. They may prefer engaging with
familiar kin, but they also easily coordinate with nonkin, even strangers.
Given opportunities, humans develop these proclivities into complex en-
terprises, such as collaboratively tracking and hunting prey, processing
food, playing cooperative games, building shelters, or designing space-
craft that reach the moon.29
APES ON A PLANE 11
tion, are beyond the scope of this book. So let’s start with sharing, a
quintessentially human trait.
During the voyage of the Beagle when the young Charles Darwin first
encountered the “savages” living in Tierra del Fuego, he was amazed to
realize that “some of the Fuegians plainly showed that they had a fair no-
tion of barter . . . I gave one man a large nail (a most valuable present)
without making any signs for a return; but he immediately picked out
two fish, and handed them up on the point of his spear.”31 Why would
sharing with others, even strangers, be so automatic? And why, in culture
after culture, do people everywhere devise elaborate customs for the pub-
lic presentation, consumption, and exchange of goods?
Gift exchange cycles like the famous “kula ring” of Melanesia, where
particip
ants travel hundreds of miles by canoe to circulate valuables, ex-
tend across the Pacific region and can be found in New Zealand, Samoa,
and the Trobriand Islands. In New Caledonia, giant yams are publicly
displayed in the Pilu Pilu ceremonies, while among the Kwakiutl, Haida,
or Tsimshian peoples along the resource-rich coast of northwest North
America as well as among the Koryak or Chuckchee peoples of Siberia,
quantities of possessions are publicly shared and destroyed in elabo-
rate potlatch ceremonies. As I write these words, I am reminding myself
to update the long lists of recipients to whom we send cards and boxes
of fresh walnuts each Christmas—my own tribe’s custom for staying in
touch with distant kin and as-if kin, the creation of which is a specialty
of the human species. The point is not merely to share but to establish
and maintain social networks, as Marcel Mauss argued in one of anthro-
pology’s early classics, Essai sur le don (The Gift). This is why dopamine-
related neural pleasure centers in human brains are stimulated when
someone acts generously or responds to a generous act.32
One of the earliest in-depth studies of traditional exchange net-
works was undertaken by the anthropologist Polly Wiessner, who has
done extensive fieldwork in Africa and New Guinea. She began her Kala-
hari research in the 1970s among the San-speaking Ju/’hoansi people,
also known as the !Kung or Bushmen, who at that time still lived as mo-
bile gatherers and hunters belonging to one of the most venerable hu-
man groups on earth. Genetic comparisons of mitochondrial DNA across
extant human populations indicate that ancestors of this relatively iso-
lated population of Khoisian people, along with those of some other
APES ON A PLANE 13
these people understood that their most important resources were their
reputations and the stored goodwill of others.
The sporadic success and frequent failures of big-game hunters is a
chronic challenge for hungry families among traditional hunter-
gatherers. One particularly detailed case study of South American forag-
ers suggests that roughly 27 percent of the time a family would fall short
of the 1,000 calories of food per person per day needed to maintain body
weight. With sharing, however, a person can take advantage of someone
else’s good fortune to tide him through lean times. Without it, perpetu-
ally hungry people would fall below the minimum number of calories
they needed. The researchers calculated that once every 17 years, caloric
deficits for nonsharers would fall below 50 percent of what was needed
21 days in a row, a recipe for starvation. By pooling their risk, the pro-
portion of days people suffered from such caloric shortfalls fell from 27
percent to only 3 percent.34
For those who store social obligations rather than food, unspoken
contracts—beginning with the most fundamental one between the
group’s gatherers and its hunters, and extending to kin and as-if kin in
other groups—tide them over from shortfall to shortfall. Time-honored
relationships enable people to forage over wider areas and to reconnect
with trusted exchange partners without fear of being killed by local in
habitants who have the advantage of being more familiar with the ter-
rain.35 When a waterhole dries up in one place, when the game moves
away, or, perhaps most dreaded of all, when a conflict erupts and the
group must split up, people can cash in on old debts and generous repu-
tations built up over time through participation in well-greased net-
works of exchange.
The particular exchange networks that Wiessner studied among the
Ju/’hoansi are called hxaro. Some 69 percent of the items every Bushman
used—knives, arrows, and other utensils; beads and clothes—were transi-
tory possessions, fleetingly treasured before being passed on in a chroni-
cally circulating traffic of objects. A gift received one year was passed on
the next.36 In contrast to our own society where regifting is regarded as
gauche, among the Ju/’hoansi it was not passing things on—valuing an
object more than a relationship, or hoarding a treasure—that was socially
unacceptable. As Wiessner put it, “The circulation of gifts in the Kala-
hari gives partners information that they ‘hold each other in their hearts’
and can be called on in times of need.”37 A distinctive feature of human
APES ON A PLANE 15