The Deadliest Of All Species Michael Thompson-Noel

Yes, humans are unique. But so is every other species. And, for most of our time as primates, whatever was unique about the human line wasnt anything human. Only within the last two million years did our ancestors acquire brains large enough to count for inclusion in the genus Homo, write Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson in Demonic Males, an excellent study of the origins of human violence. It was only around 130,000 years ago that full humanity was achieved with the emergence of our own subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens. And it was only 35,000 years or so ago that art appeared in the form of cave paintings and bone carvings.

 

But prior to that, our forebears certainly werent human. They were basic woodland apes. Further back, they were still apes but in the rainforest. Between 25 and 65 million years ago they were something more elusive, part of a group that gave rise to both monkeys and apes. That earlier ancestry is still only vague, its form hinted at by a few fossils and some of the primitive forms of living primates, write the authors. But at least we know that as long as primates existed, our ancestors have always been primates.

Demonic Males deserves to be a best-seller. Men should buy it for women, to help them sympathise with the male affliction of testosterone victimhood, which drives men to violence.

Women should buy it for men, to help them see that their inclination to rape, kill and vanquish is rooted deep in their genetic being.

Perhaps such an insight will help men get a grip on themselves, for human violence mainly means male violence, say the authors.

There are female criminals of every stripe and spot. But as a globally consistent trend, men are far more violent than women. In the US, a man is about nine times as likely as a woman to commit murder, 78 times as likely to commit forcible rape, 10 times as likely to commit armed robbery, and so on. So men are bad. Why ?

The authors approach this question from several directions, but first they investigate the chimpanzee. Until recently, wild chimpanzees were thought to lead simple lives untroubled by serious social conflict. Thirty years ago science writer, Robert Ardrey, claimed that chimps led an arcadian existence of primal innocence. They stood for an idyllic past which we once believed was the paradise that man had somehow lost.

How deeply wrong. Chimpanzees kill each other and eat monkeys alive. And they are closer relatives of humans than of gorillas. Not surprising, then, that human and chimp males both display the same features of inter-community violence as well as the same propensity for violence to individuals.

At the heart of the book is an engrossing discussion of the possible reasons why our ancestors changed from rainforest to woodland apes. The answer was almost certainly to do with food roots, quite possibly. But change they did, and swiftly, from primitive tool-shaping, meat-eating creatures to agriculturists and gunpowder investors. Yet what about our old ape brains?

Orangutans and gorillas are less violent than chimps and humans. But the fifth ape species, bonobos, are positively gentle. Until 1928, they were mistakenly thought to be small chimpanzees. As it happens, they are radically different in temperament to killer chimps and humans. One of the keys to bonobo non-violence is thought to be exceptionally strong female bonding, including sexual bonding. Yet why should that make a difference? The answer, again, is thought to trace back to food. In short, relative levels of violence among present-day apes, including humans, may be explicable in terms of what their ancestors ate, and whether they had to fight ape rivals to guard its supply.

Optimists looking for a happy ending to this book will be cast down, for it offers no great hope that human male violence can be tamed or reduced. On the other hand, they write if we are cursed with demonic male temperament, we are also blessed with an intelligence that can, through the acquisition of wisdom, draw us away from the .. stain of our ape past.