The Day Before Humanity

In the course of writing a book about what animals learn from other animals, I recently traveled to Uganda to spend three weeks with free-living chimpanzees in Budongo forest. I was working with the noted researcher Catherine Hobaiter.

Chimpanzees are very familiar to most people, of course. And like most things we think of as familiar, if we stop to think for a moment we realize we actually know almost exactly nothing about them. We know they are cute, look like little people in caricature, are in circuses and movies, can make us laugh, can kill us. Some of us know they live normally in Africa and very abnormally everywhere else, including medical labs where almost precisely nothing useful has been learned from decades of truly tormenting them, and driving them insane. A very few know there are “sanctuaries” where abused chimps can “retire” in what is just a better captivity. A tiny handful of people know that some activists are trying to get them declared “legal persons,” but most of us are confused about why. (Answer: because a legal person is the only thing that cannot be owned; anything not a person can be some person’s property.) That accounts for about 99 percent of what 99.9 percent of people know about their nearest living relative on Earth.

I digress.

I went to get material for the book, as I mentioned. Though the book is going to be about social lives and social learning, there were many eye-opening things that I saw as, each day, Cat and her field assistants led me miles into the forest to simply observe the chimps living their lives.

Daily life involves eating and drinking, of course, the drama of male ambition and their assertions of rank and dominance, the territorial tensions between chimp communities, and the tenderness and play of mothers and babies. Sometimes I felt like I was transported back a million years.

Here, I want to just highlight one of the things I found most surprising: the striking individuality present in chimp communities. You can see it in their very different faces, which reflect their very different personalities.

So have a look at these portraits, and try to realize how different each chimp is. Think about what that means about who we share life with; and about their right to exist here, with us, on this miracle planet.