IF YOU like to think of chimps as wise, rational tool-users, gorillas as gentle giants, or bonobos as sexed-up hippie apes, be prepared for a shock. Among African Apes, a collection of field diaries, is primatology given the Tarantino treatment.
In the introduction, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, emphasises that extreme violence among primates is rare. The incidents described in the book stuck in the biologists’ minds because they illustrate how aggression can influence ape society. They stuck in my mind too because, infrequent as they are, these are clearly not random episodes, but key moments in the lives of characters who behave in such familiar ways that we see ourselves in them.
“These aren’t isolated acts of violence, but key moments in the lives of characters much like us”
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In the course of the book we learn about infanticide and violent infighting among silverback gorillas. We get to know Mlima, a gorilla the biologists have been observing almost daily for six years. Through diary entries we are there when they find her dying from wounds inflicted by a younger member of her own species.
We also meet Volker, an ambitious young bonobo the researchers have followed for most of his life. Volker has close relations with Amy, a female whose baby the researchers believe he fathered, but the attention he pays her is finally punished: he is savagely beaten by his former friends. The biologists observe Volker’s screaming face as he clings to a tree trunk, then never see him again.
, also of the Max Planck Institute, describes how she tracked a trail of blood from where chimps had been vocalising loudly the night before, and made a horrible discovery: the spread-eagled body of an adult male chimp, his face battered and bruised, throat torn open and intestines dragged out.
“I feel as though I am looking at a person who has been murdered in a savage attack,” she writes. As she takes this in, the band of chimps return to the corpse, and the biologists retreat to watch. Afterwards, Head’s team finds the dead male’s penis and testicles some 30 metres away – ripped off, she speculates, as part of an emasculation ritual. The incident was so human in so many ways that she wonders: “Is our ‘moral code’ nothing more than a controlling system that humans have invented to keep some order in society?”
The answer is surely yes. So much in human culture is echoed in what we see in other apes. This book reveals unforgettably that these apes have personalities, that their societies are political and complex, and most of all that – if we need a reason – we cannot let them go extinct. Understanding them will help us understand ourselves.
Among African Apes: Stories and photos from the field
University of California Press
