Chimps, us and war as inheritance

Opinion

Jane Goodall died last week, still on the road at the age of 91 and still advocating for biodiversity in general and the welfare of chimpanzees in particular. She was a hero to me and millions of others for her courage, her wisdom and her compassion. She was also one of the greatest self-taught scientists in history.

As a young woman with no scientific training, she set up camp in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in 1960 and began to live with a band of chimpanzees. Nobody had ever done that before — all studies had been done with chimps in captivity — but she gained their trust and began to study their real character.

It was breathtakingly human. Not only are chimpanzees our closest genetic relatives, but they share the same emotions, they have individual personalities, they even think in similar patterns (although a smaller brain and the lack of language restrict the range and complexity of their thought).

After three years in Gombe, she wrote an article for National Geographic that shook the foundations not only of primatology (the study of primate behaviour) but also of anthropology.

She revealed that chimpanzees hunt and eat monkeys. (Previously they were thought to be harmless vegetarians.) She reported that they made and used tools. (Twigs stripped and shaped to fit into holes in termite hills and extract the termites.) They were far more like us than anybody had suspected.

In time this new knowledge transformed the perspectives of scientists (who used to view animals as mere biological machines and even questioned whether they were self-aware). It changed popular attitudes to wild animals too, and may have saved chimpanzee bands from extinction. But one aspect was deeply troubling: they fight wars. Like us.

Jane Goodall was still spending time with the Gombe chimpanzees in 1974 when the Kasakela group split into two smaller bands — which went to war with each other.

The war lasted four years, until all the adult males of one band had been killed and the surviving females and their young found shelter with other groups. A lot of human beings, hearing this very bad news, thought: I’ve already seen this movie, except that the protagonists were human.

It was at this time, around 1983, that Jane Goodall wrote to me about it, because I had just done a documentary television series about war. She wanted to discuss the implications of the Gombe War, because it shredded the belief that human beings had invented war with the rise of civilization.

Instead, it was an ancient family tradition. We didn’t invent war; we inherited it.

To my lasting regret, I never replied to her. It was a time of great upheaval in my life and my priorities were elsewhere. But here’s what I would have said to her then — none of which would have surprised her even so long ago, I expect.

When considering any human social or political behaviour that is problematic, remember where we come from. Any species that starts to build a civilization will be carrying a great deal of cultural baggage from its pre-civilized past.

Many customs, traditions, and even reflexes that were useful or at least tolerable for the wild version of the species will be useless or even harmful to its civilized descendants, but that doesn’t mean they will quietly go away. Nobody is in charge of updating these behaviours, and in many cases some groups or individuals will still be benefiting from them.

Evolution is not conscious and it doesn’t care about the welfare of individuals. If you are a very bright chimp, you may deplore the recurrent warfare that disfigures chimp society, but you have no words to condemn it.

Anthropologists know that human hunter-gatherers were usually trapped in similar territorial wars between neighbouring bands. That was presumably pro-survival for the group at some point in the distant past despite the cost to many individuals. However, humans have language and bigger brains, and they can reason and talk their way out of their old habits.

We are in the midst of that process now. We have been in it for the past 100 years, and we’re definitely not home and dry yet. The chimpanzees are trapped in their ugly little wars, but we may be able to escape from ours eventually.

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers.