Archive for the ‘tools’ Category
bonobo issues
Something I encountered in S J Gould’s book Life’s Grandeur, added to other little encounters in my readings and researchings, has caused a few concerns. In trying to promote bonoboism, of a kind, the last thing I’d want to do is limit humanity’s intellectual pursuits, curiosity, adaptability and general gung-ho cleverness. As if I had the power haha. So whenever I read or hear something that might suggest that bonobos aren’t as smart as chimps I get worried.
Anyway, my reading, as usual, took me on some internet journeys, in one of which I found that the average chimp brain volume is 398 cc while that of bonobos is 348 cc. Remember of course that bonobos used to be known as pygmy chimps, and the average difference in overall size between the two species pretty well corresponds to the difference in brain size, and, as smart corvids and other birds remind us, size isn’t always an indicator of such things.
But there are other worries. I’ve gotten the impression that chimps are very much tool-users, bonobos perhaps not so much. But now, on consulting the literature more closely, I’m finding that maybe this isn’t so, and so I’m losing the point of this post. But of course there are differences, behaviourally, and so cognitively, between the two species, which would be worth exploring, for our future’s sake.
A scientific article, linked below, going back to 2010, and not fully available to amateurs like me, has this to say in its abstract:
Our observations illustrate that tool use in bonobos can be highly complex and no different from what has been described for chimpanzees. The only major difference in the chimpanzee and bonobo data was that bonobos of all age–sex classes used tools in a play context, a possible manifestation of their neotenous nature. We also found that female bonobos displayed a larger range of tool use behaviours than males, a pattern previously described for chimpanzees but not for other great apes. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that the female-biased tool use evolved prior to the split between bonobos and chimpanzees.
As to their ‘neotenous’ (i.e. eternally childlike) nature, I’m wondering. Are they really any more childlike than chimps? Apparently, that’s the consensus. A more recent piece in Current Biology by Isabel Behncke, ‘Play in the Peter Pan ape’ (Peter Pan being the boy who never grows up) looks into this issue of bonobo neoteny, and play, noting that there’s a ‘small cluster of species in which adult play occurs, such as elephants, primates, social carnivores, cetaceans, parrots and corvids’. These are all highly social species, with otherwise little in the way of evolutionary connection. They do have other connections, though, apart form sociality – longevity, and neural complexity.
Behncke, in studying bonobos in the wild, argues that bonobos are more neotenous and playful than chimps, and one of her reasons for this corresponds with my own thoughts, happily. They live in a relatively abundant calorific habitat, and ‘play is energetically expensive and dwindles in conditions of resource scarcity’. Hence all those videos featuring pets at play. Hence, also, our own playful nature – sport, art, music, salons and pub chit-chat. Even our scientific explorations can be considered a form of play, at a stretch.
And then there’s sex, that Big Issue that humans beat themselves up about. Bonobo play is less solitary than that of chimps, and more sexual. I also would note that the development of tool use, which has, as mentioned, been more associated with females than males, in both bonobos and chimps, is surely associated with play. But much play between bonobos is genital-based. ‘Chasing’, especially around a solitary object such as a tree, and genital-grabbing is common, which of course can be potentially painful, but according to Behncke virtually never results in serious injury. This often happens between members of different troupes, and Behncke points out here a vital difference between the two tightly related primates. Chimps exhibit hostility between troupes, with ‘wars’ sometimes ending in wipeouts, as Jane Goodall and others have reported. Of the often fatal injuries sustained, mutilated genitals are high on the list.
So, about the sex. But first, it should be noted that communal or paired play is often about trust. The ‘hanging’ game, for example, is often played between an adult and a juvenile bonobo, in which the adult lets the child dangle from her arm, from a more or less high tree branch. Like bungee jumping, without the elasticity, but with much of the thrill. Also, play (and sex) occurs with a multitude of partners, with attendant advantages:
Play-partner diversity is important when thinking about adaptability: playing 100 times with the same individual requires less variation and adjustment of behaviour than playing 10 times with 10 different individuals. Playing with individuals of different sizes, personalities and sex requires learning about contextual-dependent behaviour: with whom and when a bite is appropriate, a chase over a push, a gentle tickle rather than a stomping slap, and so on.
So, much of this research has assured me that we’re on the right track in becoming more bonoboesque humans, in spite of Trump, Putin, Musk and other throwbacks. I’m hoping that even the USA will have a female President some time in the 21st century, and if they progress even further along the bonobo line, they might scrap their worthless semi-monarchical Presidential system altogether…
Okay, maybe in the 22nd century…
Sorry, never really got round to the sex.
References
a bonobo world: on puncturing the masculine mystique
‘They need to touch materials with their hands. They need to form materials, need to make things with their own hands out of wood, clay, iron etc. They need to own tools and handle tools. Not doing it, not being permitted to do it, does something to men. They all know it.’
Sherwood Anderson
‘A man who can’t handle tools is not a man’
Willy Loman, in Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller
It’s often pointed out by feminist writers that women do more work than men and get little acknowledgement for it. The work of nurturing children, especially in early infancy, and the unpaid work of maintaining the family – remembering important dates, events and tasks – while, also, these days, pursuing her own career. In less affluent countries, their burden is often greater, as they work for a pittance outside the home, and for nothing, economically speaking, inside it, while ceding ‘head of the household’ status to men. Marilyn French detailed the systemic discrimination against working women thirty years ago in The war against women, and given the heavy patriarchal culture women still labour under in those parts of the world dominated by the major religions, progress has been painfully slow. Here in the WEIRD world, however, there are some positive signs. It’s still overwhelmingly patriarchal even now that the WEIRD nations have largely recognised the artificiality of the ‘masculine mystique’. However, that recognition is an important step toward gynocracy.
Let me explain what I mean by the masculine mystique, since I’ve just thought of the term (so I need to explain it to myself). In Susan Faludi’s 1999 book Stiffed, a humane rendering of the quandary many men have found themselves in as the WEIRD world has become post-industrial, she quoted Sherwood Anderson and Arthur Miller on masculinity and tool use. The idea being mooted was that man was the tool-maker and tool-user, and deprived of those skills and opportunities, he felt emasculated.
This was about mastery. Without their sense of mastery, especially an exclusive mastery, one not shared by females, men weren’t really men. This masculine mystique needs to be punctured. In fact it has been punctured, but it needs to deflate quite a bit more.
Chimpanzees use tools. Bonobos too, but far less so, sad to say. One particular tool shown in a video I recently watched was a thin stick for poking into termite mounds and collecting a tasty and doubtless nutritious meal. The video presented adult chimps showing their expertise in this task, while the children fumbled and failed. Only later did I wonder – were those adult experts male or female? The commentator didn’t say, and surely this was unsurprising, surely all adults had learned this skill. Though chimps live in a largely patriarchal society, there’s surely no division of labour such that the females are expected to keep the forest clearing tidy, mind the kids and wait for the male to bring home the termites. And yet we’ve only recently come to terms, even in the WEIRD world, with female engineers, mechanics, scientists, entrepreneurs, truck-drivers and a whole lot more. In other words, throughout our history, we’ve been much more patriarchal and frankly misogynistic in our division of labour, and its spoils, than chimps have ever been. The upper classes have intoned from on high that ladies should be powdered, manicured, stupidly shod and generally decorative, and those notions are far from having been laid to rest.
Let me offer another example, a favourite of mine. In the early seventies, I attended a youth camp in the Adelaide Hills. We were kicking a soccer ball around, and one of the camp leaders beckoned to a couple of female watchers on the sidelines to come and join in. They were reluctant and giggly and seemed almost deliberately hapless, swinging and missing the ball and landing on their rumps, and giggling all the more. I was irritated, as I’d seen this before, girls almost proud of their lack of co-ordination, a kind of learned helplessness. Fast forward to the twenty-first century, and I was attending an impromptu housewarming for people a generation or two behind me. It was during the day, and the young people, about a dozen of them, trooped outside to a vacant lot behind the house, with a soccer ball. I watched them from an upstairs window. They formed a circle, kicking the ball between them. There were as many girls as lads, but there was no difference in the skill level, it seemed to me. They were all able to trap the ball, bounce it up to their heads, and pass with power and accuracy. I was amazed, and even became a bit teary. These were young girls I knew, but I didn’t know they were into soccer. And maybe they weren’t particularly. Maybe they were just brought up in a generation that had broken from that long history of patriarchal expectation or demand. They had no interest in being ladylike women, at least not all the time.
What has happened? The first women’s World Cup was held in 1991, and the past few of them have received blanket coverage. Tennis really led the way, and then golf, and now women are becoming heroes in many athletic and sporting contests, with motor sports as the next challenge. It seems that, in sporting prowess at least, the trickle-down effect may actually be real.
And this particular trickle-down can also be viewed as the trickling away of the masculine mystique, the near superhero of Bronowski’s Ascent of Man, the culmination of human can-do physical prowess. In many respects, the competencies required for the challenges in our future – the problems of global warming, reduced biodiversity, the exploitation, suffering and slaughter of other species, the reduction of poverty in our own – are not so much the competencies wrapped up in the masculine mystique package. They’re more like the competencies associated with creating unity, inclusivity, teamwork, as well as a more reflective, and dare I say sensual understanding of the world we have come to dominate, and, in our masculine way, to domineer. We can still be the can-do species, but what we have to do requires a different approach, a greater appreciation of the complexity of the world we’ve come to dominate, and which is now suffering from that domination. In a sense we’ve become the ‘earth-mother’ of the planet – we’re preserving other species in zoos and nurseries (good word), we’re waking up to our damaging habits, we’re looking for solutions that won’t entail more damage. All of this requires as much ingenuity as we’ve ever applied before. Warfare, competitive advantage, insularity and breast-beating human supremacy are not what is needed. We need something a lot more bonoboesque – a sharing of ideas, responsibility and passion, for each other (all others), and our world. And maybe, with all our failings, we’re inching towards it.