The mentalist anthropomorphism reached its apogee in the work of the Victorian psychologist, George Romanes, who eulogised the intelligence of pets, such as dogs that could lift latches and cats that seemed to understand their masters. Romanes believed that the only explanation for their behaviour was conscious choice. He went on to argue that each species of animal had a mind just like the human one, only frozen at a stage equivalent to a child of a certain age. Therefore, a chimpanzee had the mind of a young teenager, while a dog was equivalent to a younger child, and so on.7
Ignorance of wild animals sustained this notion. So little was known about the behaviour of apes that it was easy to go on thinking of them as primitive versions of people, rather than sophisticated animals that were brilliantly good at being apes. Especially with the discovery of the seemingly fierce gorilla in 1847, encounters between human beings and wild apes were exclusively brief and violent. When apes were brought to zoos, they had little opportunity to show their repertoire of wild habits, and their keepers seemed to evince more interest in their ability to ‘ape’ human customs than in what came naturally to them. For instance, from the very first arrival of chimpanzees in Europe, there seems to have been an obsession with serving them tea. The great French naturalist, Georges Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, was one of the first ‘scientists’ to see a captive chimp in about 1790. What did he find worth remarking? That he watched it ‘take a cup and saucer and lay them on the table, put in sugar, pour out its tea, leave it to cool without drinking’.8 Thomas Bewick, a few years later, reported breathlessly that an ape ‘shewn in London some years ago was taught to sit at table, make use of a spoon or fork in eating its victuals’.9 And when Tommy and Jenny reached London Zoo in the 1830s, they were quickly taught to eat and drink at table for the benefit of a paying audience. The tradition of the chimpanzee tea party was born. By the 1920s it was a daily ritual at London Zoo, the chimps trained both to ape human customs and to break them: ‘there was the ever present danger that their table manners would become too polished.’10 The chimpanzee tea parties at zoos ran for 50 years. In 1956, the Brooke Bond company made the first of many hugely successful television commercials for its tea using a chimps’ tea party, and Tetley finally dropped its chimps’ tea party advertisements only in 2002. By 1960, human beings still knew more about chimps’ ability to learn tea-table manners than they did about how the animals behaved in the wild. No wonder apes were viewed as ridiculous apprentice people.
In psychology, mentalism was soon ridiculed and demolished. The early twentieth-century psychologist Edward Thorndike demonstrated that Romanes’s dogs invariably learned their clever tricks by accident. They did not understand how a door latch worked; they simply repeated any action that accidentally enabled them to open the door. In reaction to the credulity of mentalism, psychologists began to make the opposite assumption: that animal behaviour was unconscious, automatic and reflex. The assumption was soon a creed. The radical behaviourists who brushed aside the mentalists in the same decade as the Bolsheviks brushed aside the Mensheviks asserted brusquely that animals did not think, reflect or reason; they just responded to stimuli. It became heresy even to talk about animals having mental states, let alone to attribute human understanding to them. Soon, under Burrhus Skinner, the behaviourists would apply the same logic to human beings. After all, people do not just anthropomorphise animals, accuse toasters of perversity and thunderstorms of fury. They also anthropomorphise other people, crediting them with too much reason and too little habit. Try reasoning with a nicotine addict.
But since nobody took Skinner all that seriously on the subject of people, the behaviourists had unwittingly restored the distinction between the human and the animal mind to exactly where Descartes had placed it. Sociologists and anthropologists, with their emphasis on the peculiarly human attribute called culture, had outlawed all talk of human instinct. By the middle of the twentieth century, it was heresy to speak of animal minds, and heresy to speak of human instincts. Difference, not similarity, was all.
THE SIMIAN SOAP OPERA
That was all to change in 1960, when a young woman virtually untrained in science began to watch chimpanzees on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. As she later wrote:
How naïve I was. As I had not had an undergraduate science education I didn’t realise that animals were not supposed to have personalities, or to think, or to feel emotions or pain…Not knowing, I freely made use of all those forbidden terms and concepts in my initial attempts to describe, to the best of my ability, the amazing things I had observed at Gombe.11
As a result, Jane Goodall’s account of life among the chimps of Gombe reads like a soap opera about the Wars of the Roses written by Jane Austen – all conflict and character. We feel the ambition, the jealousy, the deception and the affection; we distinguish personalities; we sense motives; we cannot help but empathise:
Gradually, Evered’s confidence returned – partly, no doubt, because Figan was by no means always with his brother: Faben was still friendly with Humphrey, and Figan, wisely, steered clear of the powerful male. Moreover, even when the brothers were together, Faben did not always help Figan: sometimes he just sat and watched.12
Though few realised it until later, Goodall’s anthropomorphism had driven a stake through the heart of human exceptionalism. Apes were revealed not as blundering, primitive automata, who were bad at being people, but as beings with social lives as complex and subtle as ours. Either human beings must be more instinctive, or animals must be more conscious than we had previously suspected. The similarities, not the differences, were what caught the attention.
Of course, the news that Goodall had narrowed the Cartesian gap travelled very slowly across the divide between animal and human sciences. Even though the very purpose of Goodall’s study, as conceived by her mentor the anthropologist Louis Leakey, was to shed light on the behaviour of ancient human ancestors, anthropologists and sociologists were trained to ignore animal findings as irrelevant. When Desmond Morris spelled out the similarities in his book The Naked Ape in 1967, he was generally dismissed as a sensationalist by most students of humankind.
Defining human uniqueness had been a cottage industry for philosophers for centuries. Aristotle said man was a political animal. Descartes said we were the only creature that could reason. Marx said we alone were capable of conscious choice. Now only by heroically narrow definitions of these concepts could Goodall’s chimps be excluded.
St Augustine said we were the only creature to have sex for pleasure rather than procreation. (A reformed libertine should know.) Chimpanzees begged to differ, and their southern relatives, bonobos, were soon to blow the definition to smithereens. Bonobos have sex to celebrate a good meal, to end an argument or to cement a friendship. Since much of this sex is homosexual or with juveniles, procreation cannot even be an accidental side effect.
Then we thought we were the only species to make and use tools. One of the first things Jane Goodall observed was chimpanzees fashioning stalks of grass to extract termites, or crushing sponges of leaves to get drinking water. Leakey telegraphed her ecstatically: ‘Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.’
Next we told ourselves that we alone had culture: the ability to transmit acquired habits from one generation to the next by imitation. But what are we to make of the chimpanzees of the Tai forest in West Africa, which for many generations have taught their young to crack nuts using wooden hammers on a rock anvil? Or the killer whales that have utterly different hunting traditions, calling patterns and social systems according to which population they belong to?