Randomings

I watched an amazing NOVA documentary on PBS last night titled ‘Ape Genius’. It showcased an hour of experiments, footage and commentary showing us that apes are more like humans than we ever thought possible. What they were trying to find were the little details that sets us apart from the apes. Why were we able to have evolved to where we are today, and why have they stayed primitive? They were able to show that apes have culture like we do. They have the ability to use tools, to reason and the ability to cooperate. They are able to understand complex arbitrary sentences, and able to count as well. I always knew that apes were pretty smart, but I realised after watching that we might need to redefine what it means to be human.

The first part of the film we get a glimpse at their ability to use tools and solve problems. At the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, psychologist Josep Call puts a clear tube in one of the chimp’s cage. He then puts a peanut at the bottom of the tube. The chimp sees the peanut and tries to stick his finger inside to get it, but can’t reach it. After pacing back and forth for 10 minutes, he gets a Eureka moment. He goes to his water dish and fills his mouth full of water. He then goes to the tube and spits the water into the tube which causes the peanut to float. There wasn’t enough water the first time to lift the peanut high enough, so he goes back for few more water trips until eventually there’s enough water in the tube so that he can grab the peanut. “They have to understand that they can use the water as a tool. This is interesting, because the water itself doesn’t have any shape.“, remarks Call. I find this remarkable because this puzzle might be tough even to some adult humans.

Another display of cunningness takes us to Senegal, Africa, where anthropologist Jill Pruetz and psychologist Andrew Whiten were witness to something few have seen before. The chimps were observed using spears to hunt bush babies, a small nocturnal primate. Bush babies are one of the chimp’s staples in that area. To make the spears, the chimps would cut off a long branch, remove the leaves, and chew the tip to sharpen it. They would then proceed to find bush baby nests, which are holes in the trees, and strike the spears repeatedly inside it. I felt I was in the Twilight Zone watching this. The picture seemed crazy to me. Apes with spears, actual weapons that they themselves figured out how to construct and use. It’s mind boggling! The spear hunting also spread to the other chimps in the group. Generating ideas and sharing technology is a scientific definition of culture, so can we say that apes are cultured then? It sounds strange thinking about it. When I think of culture I think of it only as a collection of human marvels like music, literature and dance.

But how did they all acquire the knowledge of spear making? One ape first had to come up with the idea, a pretty complicated task in itself. Hatching up new ideas was belived to be what separated us apart from all creatures in the first place. To come up with an idea is a process of many complicated steps. It requires awareness, planning, creativity, memory and reason. So let’s try to reenact the discovery of spears for apes to see how they might have done so. Let’s say that an ape is playing with a stick by whacking it at different things because it finds that amusing. It hits various objects like a few trees, some rocks, and is having a jolly good time doing it. He is feeling the sensation of cause and effect and likes it very much. At one point the ape accidently hits a bird who was flying by. The bird falls to the ground and dies. The ape saw the bird slam into his stick and fall to the ground. If the ape had no ability to come up with new ideas, then this scenario could happen again and again and the ape would never piece it together that the stick was responsible for killing the bird. But at one point, instead the ape had to have made that connection, otherwise there wouldn’t be any spear hunting apes today. To make that connection, it has to have a memory and awareness because it has to remember that the bird hit the stick previously. It has to be able to reason that it was the stick that was responsible for the free meal, so that requires a basic sense of logic(if A happens, then B is the outcome). Of course it wasn’t thinking in words, but rather in pictures. The next time it got hungry, it remembered the bird and the stick and how he was swinging it around. Maybe if he swings it around this time, he thinks, he can catch another meal. Only this time, he’s not just playing; he’s swinging the stick while looking for birds. He has it planned out in a basic way. So maybe now he sees a bird. He keeps his awareness on the bird this time while swinging the stick like crazy, trying to make the bird fall. He probably starts screeching in excitement jumping up and down, swinging his stick like cazy and screeching some more ape sounds. All the while the bird is long gone, having been scared by all the excitement. Because apes learn well by observing other apes and mimicking, I can imagine the other apes at this point might also pick up sticks. Soon after, all the apes are rampaging through the forest hitting things, jumping around and screeching, until eventually one starts to go after little critters. Maybe he manages to hit it and kill it reinforcing the collective idea that hitting food that is usually hard to catch can go limp if it is hit with a stick, making it easier to catch. Again, this is not thought out in words, but instead with pictures of past occurences and instincts of cause and effect. So in no time, they are all grabbing sticks to hunt for food and without realising it, have advanced ape technology.

Through many more demonstrations showing monkeys’ ability to count, cooperate, and understand language, the program concludes that it’s not because apes lack the ability to reason and invent that they have remained primitive. It is because apes do not have a shared commitment to a shared goal. They remain passive about their discoveries, where we humans pass down knowledge and improve it. It is because humans want and have the mental capacity to teach our young that we progress while apes don’t. Monkey see, monkey do; human see, human publishes findings.

Justin Bohemier