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BOOKMARK Human Aggression: even in New Scientist the Male Agenda puts the Spin on Research. Sat 3rd March.
Early last week there was an item on the Today Programme about chimpanzees making spears and using them to kill prey. (The program quite often gets snippets like this out of the New Scientist). It seemed it was the female chimpanzees who did this, and the interviewee (who may have been Jill Pruetz of Iowa State University) described a female with an infant clinging ventrally, who obviously would find it difficult to chase prey, who used a "spear". The male interviewer presented this as the females being as a aggressive as males, and possibly showing that human aggression evolved through women initially and not through men. The interviewee was somewhat disconcerted by this view of the research and responded with some remark about trying not to see it like that, as if it was a legitimate point of view! It seems quite impossible to get it into the public consciousness that Homo sapiens did not evolve from chimpanzees, and the "make it sexy" attitude of interviewers like this one is one of the reasons.
As usual I only heard part of this item, and so looked for more information in my usual source, the next copy of the New Scientist. I thought it had let me down but this week there is a short item (page 16) under the headline "Savannah chimps get armed and dangerous". The article makes no specific mention of human aggression but in spite of that it colludes with the pervasive male agenda to make male excessive aggression an evolved behaviour. Of course the New Scientist is a newspaper and so could claim that it must enliven/sex-up its style; does this justify the loaded words of the headline? The text also contains anthropomorphic overtones, and I'll quote: -- "In the savannah habitat of Fongoli the chimps, Pan troglodytes verus, often hunt green monkeys, but adult males have priority over access to the meat. So female and juvenile chimps have found their own way to procure meat: they fashion short spears, which they sharpen with their teeth, to hunt one of the cutest primates in Africa -- bushbabies." Because Bushbabies can scamper away quickly from the tree hollows in which they sleep during the day "the chimps have devised a grisly method of slowing them down. The chimps used the tools along the lines of a weapon to incapacitate the prey". They were observed to make "multiple downward stabs??. as a human might wield a dagger." A final quote: " immatures and females are innovative in solving the problem of feeding competition". The theme of the article is how this, and another interesting observation that the chimps shelter in caves to keep cool, making it ever more difficult to define humans as special, but in spite of all its efforts to be inclusive and non-sexist the New Scientist is still, in the unrecognised subtext, pushing the male agenda on human aggression.
There is of course an entirely different way of viewing this particular ethological observation which is much truer to the facts. It demonstrates how the chimpanzee dyad survives more successfully by using brainpower. All the words I have picked out above are irrelevant. They would not be used to describe the actions of a female chimp fishing for ants, which they do more often than the males; the famous Flo carrying a prepared twig was never described as "armed and dangerous" though from the viewpoint of the un-cuddly ant she certainly was! No one bothered to point out how this observation is a further nail in the coffin of the idea of males supporting females with food when they most need it. The female chimps in fact were neither being aggressive nor competitive but merely inventive in the garnering of essential food resources just as I have suggested was the case with the extremely vulnerable bipedal early Homo female/infant dyad (see The First Year of Life?. and Chapter 9). In other words this is another piece of evidence for looking to the first year of life when considering the evolution of Homo sapiens. Posted Sunday 4th March. |
