Neocons favor the chimpanzee -- macho and violent -- as model of our ape ancestor. But "Ardi" seems to have had more in common with the hippie-like bonobo.
The most outrageous claim regarding "Ardi" (the recently discovered 4.4 million year old fossil of a human ancestor) came from a press release by Kent State University with the headline: "Man Did Not Evolve From Apes."
You can imagine how creationists and intelligent-designers jumped on this statement as a gift from God, and how some media outlets got confused, saying that this must mean that apes descend from us. But the claim was quickly retracted. What the scientists meant is that we do not descend from any extant apes. Like us, apes have changed considerably since we parted our evolutionary ways.
Our ancestor surely was an ape, but what this creature looked like is anybody's guess. And here it gets political!
In the 1970s, humans were known as born "killer apes" with an insatiable lust to eliminate their own kind. At about the same time, chimpanzees were found to brutally kill their neighbors and to commit infanticide. The chimpanzee was quickly adopted as our ancestral type, meaning that violence is in our DNA, that humanity will wage war in perpetuity, and that competition and power struggles are our way of life. Anyone who thought differently was considered a romantic dreamer.
Revelations about the bonobo's way of life arrived more than a decade later and threatened this picture. With their "gay" relations, female supremacy, and "make love -- not war" pacifism, bonobos became the idols of the left. They were almost too "politically correct" to be true.
Unfortunately, this primate was barely taken seriously by science despite the fact that it is genetically exactly as close to us as the chimpanzee. The more science learned about bonobos, the more they became a thorn in the side of Hobbesians as well as homophobes. Attempts were made to sideline them by declaring bonobos an offshoot on the evolutionary tree. They were obviously a delightful species, it was said, but we were welcome to ignore them. When it came to human evolution, they were irrelevant.
To show how political this debate has become, consider a 2007 essay in The New Yorker that tried to reduce the bonobo's sexiness while enhancing its aggressiveness by cherry-picking the evidence. This botched piece of journalism was gleefully picked up by neocons (not usually interested in evolution), such as Dinesh D'Souza, who accused liberals of having fashioned the bonobo into their mascot. They urged them to stick with the donkey.
Let me be as explicit as I can be: there exists not a single report anywhere in the literature with a confirmed case of one bonobo killing another, neither in captivity nor in the wild. We have lots of such reports for the chimpanzee, and I myself have witnessed a brutal assault and castration by males against a rival, not unlike the gruesome attacks in recent years by chimps on people. Chimpanzees can be vicious. Obviously, bonobos are not free of aggression, but Japanese primatologist Takeshi Furuichi -- the only scientist to have extensively studied both chimpanzees and bonobos in the jungle -- said it best:
"With bonobos everything is peaceful. When I see bonobos they seem to be enjoying their lives."
So, what does this have to do with Ardi?
Ardi has changed our perspective on the last common ancestor because of her smaller, blunter canine teeth. Canine teeth are very well developed in chimpanzees, who have long, sharp "fangs" that the males use to rip open rivals. Ardi, it is said, must have been more peaceful, perhaps because her species had found a way to reduce male-to-male conflict.
Whereas the chief anthropologist on the Ardi team goes by the bonobo-like name of Owen Lovejoy, he focuses all of this attention on the chimpanzee, as is tradition in his field. Since chimps are violent and Ardi probably wasn't, he argues that we have a totally unique creature on our hands. His pet theory is that this must mean that Ardi and her contemporaries were monogamous, but unless the diggers come up with a male and female fossil holding hands and having wedding rings, the idea that these ancestors avoided conflict through pair-bonding remains pure speculation. There is no evidence for it, and the only pair-bonded primate we have in our direct lineage (the gibbon) has in fact huge canine teeth.
Bonobos stand and walk upright quite easily, here an adult female (left) and an adolescent male. Photo by the author.
It is high time for a new look at the bonobo. This species has relatively small canines, is remarkably peaceful, and highly promiscuous. When bonobos stand upright, they look eerily human-like because their legs are longer than those of any other ape and they seem to more fully stretch their backs. Harold Coolidge, the anatomist who first described this species, in 1933, noted that the bonobo "may approach more closely to the common ancestor" than any living ape.
What if we descend not from a blustering chimp-like ancestor but from a gentle, empathic bonobo-like ape? Or what if we share characteristics with both of these close relatives instead of just the one favored by our personal political ideology? Ardi is telling us something, and there may be little agreement about what she is saying, but I hear a refreshing halt to the drums of war that have accompanied all previous theories.
After writing a bestselling atheist "consciousness-raiser," is it at all surprising that Dawkins now finds his evolution book being prominently linked to atheism in the media mind?
Ellen Futter: Adapt We Must: What the Dinosaurs Can Teach Us About Current Challenges
If today, after many years of "business as usual," our society, our systems, and our institutions are all undergoing a kind of evolutionary burst, then how do we ensure that it yields change for the better?
G.A. Bradshaw: The Scientists' Bark
The author of Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us About Humanity examines new findings from primatology and neurobiology.
Dan Agin: Nicholas Wade, Wadeian Evolution, and Twisted Knickers
The intellectual difficulty is that human social behavior is like an opera. Evolution provides the floorboards, but the arias, the drama, the story are most directly understood in terms of culture and history.
Humans show their liberal qualities by mating with strangers(outside groups) .
and ohhh boy, do people have a lot of sex and worry about sex all the time...
Outside of that,i m afraid i would not see too much Liberalism ,even in our kind,living cousins.
Considering that humans share something like 98% of our DNA with dogs and cats, it seems reasonable to believe that somewhere, somehow in the evolution of every species, we are evolutionarily related to dogs and cats.
Whether we evolved from chimps or bonobos just doesn't seem to matter. We are who we are and we have to deal with our social and political issues in the here and now, and if we are going to look at the root causes of these issues, we should only go back so far as whatever split we might have made from the other primates.
To quote Popeye "I am what I am"
And we are RELATED to chimps and bonobos, we did not evolve FROM them. We have a common ancestor.
And lastly, why does it matter? Your lack of curiosity is pretty shocking, you really don't care? If you didn't know who your parents were, would you not care? A similar idea.
There is also some noteworthy applicable reasons for caring about this stuff. Depending on what we find, it could be applied to furthering medicine, among other things, indirectly.
Knowledge is always good, to sum up.
Tracing our evolutionary path is simply the history of our biology, rather than of our societies.
George W. Bush's lack of conscience and capacity for mass murder and unapologetic, bald-faced lies, is clearly evidence that humanity carries a reptilian gene. But that's an insult to reptiles...
Cro Magnons were individualistic hunters, Neanderthals had bigger brains and lived in tight social tribes and enjoyed art...it kind of makes sense, you know. But going back as far as Ardi, unless you can find various traces of their living environment, tools, and the like, isn't going to be a very fruitful endeavor.
Gorillas: live in single-male multiple-female groups
Orangutans: live alone, females raise young
Gibbons: live in pairs, enforce "incest" taboo by driving off adolescent young
Chimpanzees: multiple-male multiple-female groups, promiscuous with dominant males trying to monopolize females in estrus
Bonobos: multi-male multi-female groups with promiscuity across genders and generations, female dominance
Humans: all of the above, and other patterns besides.
That IS our pattern: whatever works. About all we don't do is throw our eggs and sperm in a pile at the full moon, like oysters.
Mao and Stalin killed more people than any other leaders and they where on the left(they sure where caring off others needs). They sure where peace loving. Being Ukrainian your statement is offensive and rac_ist. I guess you support stalin starving millions and millions of Ukrainians so he could take care of the "needs" of the Soviet Union, right? YOur ignorance disgust me. Dozens of my dead family members where not exploited??????
Don't put politics into evolutionary science with your stupidity. Bonobos are not more or less evolved than chimps.(you seem to lack the understanding of what evolve means in a scientific sense)
NOt making a statement about politics but rather to educate your ignorance, Chimps are more numerous and more successful than Bonobos. And it has nothing to do with left or right.
by his modern day beliefs--his wants, wishes and desires--
and man waltzes through cultural periods after cultural periods.
As cultures change, beliefs will change. As beliefs change, reality
changes-and new cultures are born. Oddly enough, that's called
evolution.
Revisionist feminist history has influenced my thinking about the evolution of culture in humans. Early archeology points to matriarchal beginnings. With the rise of agriculture came the owing of things... and people. Bullies began to get the upper hand. Women were repressed. Technological advances of the last hundred years make brute strength less of an issue which makes gender less of an issue. Even DNA testing means men no longer need to sit on women to avoid raising cuckoos. Why do we need brute strength when a button is pushed in California and people die in Pakistan? Just for instance.
Anyway. Barbara Erinrich is a long and deep thinker on this subject and so is the lesser known Z. Budapest.
I thought of this the other day as i gazed at a picture of a 19th century boy in a dress with curls. It seems when gender was more of an issue in adults, parents made less of an issue of it in children. Now... when gender is hardly an issue at all, people are going nuts shoving pink plastic at little girls and robots at boys. It's a sort of dying spasm of an old culture. Finger crossed.