Ariel casts
out Caliban
The popular concept of the ‘killer-ape’
offers a pessimistic reflection of
humanity and its origins, but the latest
research shows that a primate species
whose success is based on mutual aid
and pleasure, not violence, is our closest
relative. Eric Michael Johnson considers
the better bonobos of our nature
“Nature never intends the generation of a monster.”
John Bramhall, Bishop of Derry, in debate with Thomas Hobbes (1645)
n 1607, after being held captive by the
I
Portuguese in West Africa’s Congo Basin
for nearly 18 years, the English sailor
Andrew Battell returned home with lurid tales
of “ape monsters”. The larger of the two
creatures Battell described, according to the
edited volume later published by travel writer
Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes, “is in
all proportion like a man”, but “more like a
giant in stature…and has a man’s face, hollow-
eyed, with long haire upon his browes”. These
marauding beasts “goe many together, and
kill many [villagers]…they are so strong,
that ten men cannot hold one of them”.
Battell’s narrative, much of which was
received second hand and sure to be highly
imaginative, was nevertheless one of Western
society’s earliest introductions to our
evolutionary cousins, the great apes.
Simia quam similis turpissima bestia nobis
(“How similar the ape, this ugliest of beasts,
34 Times Higher Education 21 April 2011
is to ourselves”). What the Roman poet
STEVE BLOOM/ALAMY
Ennius presented in the 2nd century BC
was a refrain that could be heard repeatedly
during the subsequent two millennia whenever
Europeans encountered this being that so
threatened the line separating human and
animal. The common depiction of non-human
primates in the West as representations of
sin and the Devil, wickedness, frivolity,
impulsivity and violence would ultimately
say more about our own discomfort at being
reminded of similar qualities in ourselves than
their nature.
But it is the depiction of the ape as monster
that is even more revealing. When Bishop John
Bramhall challenged Thomas Hobbes’ position
on free will in 1645 by insisting that “Nature
never intends the generation of a monster,” he
wasn’t referring to apes but to what today we
would call a mutant; something fundamentally
unnatural and far removed from ourselves. For

Battell, and those who came after him, to use
this term repeatedly for describing great apes
suggests that the experience was so profoundly
disturbing that the only recourse was to
relegate them to some narrow island of the
mind where any similarities with humans
could be ignored. The ape, to adopt lines from
Shakespeare written at the time, was “a
perfidious…howling…abominable monster”,
little more than “a born devil, on whose
nature nurture can never stick”.
As it turns out, William Shakespeare’s
The Tempest (1611), generally accepted to be
the Bard’s final production, was ideally timed
for the playwright to have encountered the
story of these ape monsters. As science writer
Dale Peterson has shown, enclosed in the
same edited volume that contained Battell’s
narrative was the report of a tragic shipwreck
in the Bermuda Islands that Shakespeare is
known to have used while developing his
script. While the play has been widely inter-
preted as a commentary on 17th-century
British colonialism, the relationship between
the part-human, part-animal Caliban and his
master Prospero – a deposed duke, marooned
on an island prison, who has learned to
manipulate the natural world – suggests that
Shakespeare may have been asking deeper
questions about human nature during a time
of systemic change. Caliban, portrayed as an
ugly, selfish and disloyal wretch who forges
a plot to murder his master in his sleep,
embodies nearly all of the characteristics
usually imposed on apes and is referred to
as a “monster” no less than 45 times.
The kind of exotic travel narrative that
Purchas sought out in the sailor Battell or that
Shakespeare chose as his swansong came at
a unique time in Western history, between the
publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’ new
model of the universe in 1543 and Galileo
Galilei’s famous confirmation of his insights
in 1632. As the new physics and cosmological
discoveries were destabilising humanity’s
central position in the celestial order, biology
and the discovery of great apes began to
fracture a previously ordered hierarchy in
the natural world. In time, the “beasts”
and “killers” that travellers such as Battell
encountered in distant lands would give rise
to a new generation of monsters, ones that
would only loom closer as a disoriented public
struggled to maintain their balance during a
period of rapid change.
hile it seems clear that the larger of
W Battell’s two “monsters” was most
likely a gorilla, the “lesser” figure
he referenced could have been either a
chimpanzee or a bonobo, since both are
endemic to that region of Africa. All three
species, along with humans and orangutans,
comprise the Hominidae family, more
commonly known as great apes (the more
distantly related gibbon, the only ape with
a consistently monogamous lifestyle, is in
a separate taxonomic category).
Research published last month by the
online journal PLoS Genetics is the latest to
emphasise our close relationship to the great
apes. In direct contradiction to the idea of
apes as monsters (or even perhaps its ultimate
36 Times Higher Education 21 April 2011
DANIEL HEUCLIN/NATURE PICTURE LIBRARY
rationale), it adds to the multiple genetic made by Charles Darwin as early as 1871.
analyses carried out over the past 20 years that But if Dart thought his ship had come in,
found that the two Pan species – P. troglodytes it was an illusion. Few of his colleagues were
(chimps) and P. paniscus (bonobos) – share looking to Africa for important discoveries,
about 98.8 per cent of their DNA with and certainly not to South Africa. Asia is
humans. The “monsters” of yore are but where hominin evolution was expected to have
minor variations of ourselves. However, the occurred and Dart, along with his child-sized
latest study moves the percentage even closer skull, was a laughing stock. Isolated and
and raises intriguing questions about what rejected by his colleagues, but sitting on a
the rate of evolutionary change in our closest treasure trove of readily accessible fossil
relatives might tell us about human origins. material, Dart began to imagine. Like the
The study was the product of an inter- deposed Prospero, manipulating the reality
national team who, for the first time, of his island prison and populating his loneli-
constructed a comprehensive family tree of all ness with phantasms from his own mind, he
living primate species from the mouse lemur to fashioned a monstrous creature that would
the great apes. By conducting a comparative serve him in the years to come.
analysis of 54 nuclear gene regions – DNA Caves are ideal environments for fostering
that is passed on through sexual reproduction the transformation of bone into rock and
– the resulting phylogeny creates a temporal maintaining stable conditions for the preserva-
map that places each of the 186 species into an
evolutionary relationship with all the others
over a period of 90 million years. Like Prospero, manipulating the reality
As the genetic and fossil data have shown,
Homo and Pan shared a common ancestor
of his island prison and populating his
until about 6.5 million years ago. Following loneliness with phantasms, Dart
this speciation event, bonobos and chimpan-
zees then split from their common ancestor
fashioned a monstrous creature that
approximately 1.5 million years ago. Conven- would serve him in the years to come
tional wisdom has always been that humans
are equally related to both species, the same tion of fossil remains. It was in just such a
way that you would be equally related to cave that Dart’s “killer-ape” was born. As
cousins born to different aunts on the same more australopithecine fossils were discovered,
side of your family. Despite this identical protected in these subterranean lairs, it was
relationship, however, chimpanzees have long revealed that they were often associated with
been the preferred models for testing assump- the discarded remains of partially consumed
tions about what the Homo-Pan ancestor mammals. It was unlikely that such an
would have been like. assemblage could have developed by chance
“Until now the strategy of many anthro- and Dart interpreted these animals as victims
pologists has been to marginalise the bonobo,” of our hominin forebears, who were now
says Frans de Waal, a leading primatologist revealed to be “confirmed killers”.
who studies great ape behaviour and cognition
at Emory University’s Yerkes National Primate s Dart would describe in the article “The
Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia. De Waal
has done more than any other researcher to
bring attention to this close relative: among
A predatory transiation from ape to man”,
the human lineage was therefore
descended from “carnivorous creatures, that
its ranks, female alliances intimidate males, seized living quarries by violence, battered
sexual behaviour is as diverse as our own, them to death, tore apart their broken bodies,
and cooperation replaces aggression as the dismembered them limb from limb, slaking
norm in social interactions. their ravenous thirst with the hot blood of
“Perhaps this new genetic analysis will victims and greedily devouring livid writhing
finally open the eyes of many that we have for flesh”. Standing over the imagined carnage,
four decades been hearing an overly narrow Dart saw that Man had emerged, red in tooth
perspective on human evolution,” he says. and claw, with a lust for death.
“Ever since Raymond Dart, anthropologists This ancestral Caliban, a creature that
have been seriously invested in a theory of longed for bloody violence (to “batter his
humans as aggressive, tying human progress skull, or paunch him with a stake, or cut his
to warfare and all of our accomplishments wesand [windpipe] with thy knife”) was, for
to defeating so-called ‘lesser’ tribes.”
Dart was the progenitor of this “we are the
champions” literature, beginning in 1925,
Dart, the beginning of human domination
over nature. But he was far from the only
anthropologist with nightmares depicting
when he built his dark vision of human evolu- violent and predatory habits in the human
tion on the back of one of the most important past. The horrors of the Second World War
scientific discoveries in history, made the offered such stuff as nightmares are made of
previous year: the 2.8 million-year-old and in the following decades researchers
hominin fossil Australopithecus africanus, increasingly turned to the “Dark Continent”
then the earliest known member of the human to find causal explanations for the worst
lineage ever discovered. Ironically, he had excesses of human violence.
never wanted to go to Africa and viewed his For the American primatologist Sherwood
position there as a demotion, marooned to the Washburn, Australopithecus africanus was
backwaters with little hope for career advance- “already a hunter”, but through him emerged
ment. His fortuitous discovery of a juvenile a killing instinct honed by evolution. “Man is
skull, the “Taung child”, was a major naturally aggressive,” wrote Washburn, in
breakthrough that confirmed a prediction Man the Hunter, “he naturally enjoys the
21 April 2011 Times Higher Education 37

destruction of other creatures…Other human
beings were simply the most dangerous game.”
Joining him was Nobel prizewinning ethologist
Konrad Lorenz, who wrote in On Aggression
that our tool-bearing australopithecine
ancestors “promptly used their new weapon to
kill not only game, but fellow members of their
species as well”. Completing the raiding party
was the science populariser Robert Ardrey,
who recrafted Dart’s vision for a new genera-
tion of readers in the 1960s with his book
African Genesis. “We were born of risen apes,
not fallen angels,” he wrote, “and the apes
were armed killers besides.”
That there was little in the way of fossil evi-
dence supporting these pessimistic conclusions
didn’t seem to have been noticed. “Virtually
all our theories about human origins were
relatively unconstrained by fossil data,” says
David Pilbeam, a palaeoanthropologist at
Harvard University, in Current Argument on
Early Man (1980). “Our theories have often
said far more about the theorists than about
what actually happened.”
What actually did happen, something that
would have to wait until the mid-1970s to
be established, was altogether different. The
animal remains that Dart found scattered
throughout hominin caves were actually the
leftovers from African carnivores such as lions
and leopards. Australopithecines had not been
38 Times Higher Education 21 April 2011
the predators; they were the prey. While some
of them may have fashioned basic stone tools,
they most likely used these as cutting imple-
ments to carve up animals that had already
been killed by larger, more dangerous hunters.
But by then the myth of the killer-ape had
already caught hold and Dart’s conjuration
had mesmerised millions. Already popular
in comic books and adventure novels, now
moviegoers witnessed the origin story of this
monster in the opening sequence of Stanley
Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
Choreographed by Dart’s student Phillip
Tobias, the scene depicts a ragged australo-
pithecine who raises a discarded femur against
his brother and employs it to commit the
world’s first murder. Afterwards, in an ecstasy
of violence, this would-be Cain hurls the bone
skywards where, in a multimillion-year jump,
it becomes an orbiting spacecraft. The meta-
phor is unmistakable: through aggression,
selfishness and the tools of violence lay the
secret to humanity’s success. The wages of sin
may be death, but the compound interest was
paid out in dividends of human progress.
“Then suddenly,” says Jane Goodall, pio-
neering primatologist, in Reason for Hope,
“we found that chimpanzees could be brutal –
that they, like us, had a dark side to their
nature.” Previously the killer-ape had to be
imagined and their tools of violence
CYRIL RUOSO/GETTY
manipulated to create the monster. But now
the carnage was real. The earliest long-term
field studies in the 1960s began to reveal
Pan troglodytes as the monster we’d always
known him to be, confirming the worst fears
about our own nature. Chimps would engage
in all-male raiding parties to patrol their
territory and murder outsiders who strayed
too near. There were documented cases of
infanticide, cannibalism, the murder of group
members, as well as the orgiastic ferocity of
the hunt. The story to explain humanity’s Fall
had already been written and the new “killer-
ape” could now step into the role.
“Chimpanzee-like violence preceded and
paved the way for human war,” explains
Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham in
his 1996 book Demonic Males: Apes and the
Origins of Human Violence, “making modern
humans the dazed survivors of a continuous,
5-million-year habit of lethal aggression.”
fter being confined her whole life to the
A same island prison as her embittered
father, Prospero’s youthful daughter
Miranda was overjoyed at the prospect of a
new life. “How many goodly creatures are
there here!” she announced. “O brave new
world, that has such people in’t!” For those
who had grown up expecting monsters, the
discovery of bonobos provoked a similar
hopeful response in the generation after Dart.
The tragedy for many is that they were known
about all along but were ignored because they
didn’t fit the story crafted for human origins.
Even before bonobos were identified as
a distinct species in 1929, it was clear that
something was different about these apes. In
1925, the same year that Dart was summoning
his killer-ape from the subterranean caves of
Africa, Robert Yerkes, the American psycholo-
gist and primatologist, encountered a
remarkably different chimpanzee he named
“Prince Chim”. This individual was notably
more sensitive, altruistic and intelligent than
any ape Yerkes had ever encountered. What
the great psychologist did not know at the
time was that Prince Chim was a bonobo.
“Doubtless there are geniuses even among
the anthropoid apes,” Yerkes observed.
“Prince Chim seems to have been an intellec-
tual genius.” Yerkes was so struck by his
behaviour that he titled the book based on his
encounter Almost Human (1925).
Anatomically, bonobos were also found to
be strikingly human-like and many initially
doubted Dart’s claim that Australopithecus
africanus was a human ancestor precisely
because the skull was so similar to that of the
newly discovered bonobo. Subsequent research
on bonobos has found regular bipedalism,
face-to-face mating (requiring a more ventral
orientation of the vagina), reduced limb and
Through aggression and the tools of
violence lay the secret to humanity’s
success. The wages of sin may be
death, but the compound interest
was paid out in dividends of progress
body proportions, reduced canines, greater
breadth of diet, larger group sizes and reduced
competition within groups; all traits shared
more closely with humans than chimpanzees.
As early as 1933, Harold Coolidge, the
anatomist who gave Pan paniscus its eventual
taxonomic status (and who performed the
post-mortem on Prince Chim), concluded that
this ape “may approach more closely to the
common ancestor of chimpanzees and man
than does any living chimpanzee”.
Bonobos directly contradict the monstrous
reflection of human nature reproduced over
the subsequent 80 years. While they are far
from passive, they reveal a species that suc-
ceeds more through mutual aid than through
aggressive violence. “From the point of view
of individual survival, they are the most
successful species among the higher primates,”
says Takayoshi Kano, a Japanese primatologist
who has overseen the longest continuous field
study of bonobos in the wild. “They prove
that individuals can coexist without relying on
competition and dominant-subordinate rank,”
he writes in The Last Ape.
Such differences suggest that chimpanzees
and bonobos have undergone very different
selection pressures since they diverged from
a common ancestor, unique environments that
inscribed unique patterns of genetic informa-
tion over time. According to Kano, the
differences between bonobos and chimpanzees
are likely the result of the bonobo habitat
remaining “a relatively stable forest environ-
ment”, whereas chimpanzees adapted to more
variable conditions.
These differences in habitat may be reflected
in the recent PLoS Genetics analysis that
suggests chimpanzees have undergone more
alterations in their genetic code than the
bonobos, an estimated divergence of 12.4 per
cent from our Homo-Pan ancestors.
“If that were true,” says de Waal, “then
bonobos would be our closest relative, with
the chimpanzee a close second and gorillas in
third place.” Statistically, the 12.4 per cent
difference does not make bonobos significantly
closer to humans than chimpanzees (both
Pan species remain sister taxa), but it has
evolutionary researchers puzzled over what
this could mean about human origins.
“They’ve found that chimpanzees have one
extra substitution for every six between
humans and bonobos, and that’s strange,”
says John Hawks, biological anthropologist at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Chimpanzee nucleotides – The A, C, T or G
base pairs that make up the vocabulary of
DNA – have been evolving faster, substituting
one for another at a higher rate since the two
species separated from their common ancestor.
“This is enough DNA that they really
shouldn’t differ so much by chance,” he says.
Jonathan Eisen, evolutionary biologist at
the University of California, says this coincides
with additional research (such as that
published in Nature by Tomas Marques-Bonet
et al. in 2009) showing an increased genetic
substitution rate in chimpanzees compared
with humans. More research is needed before
any conclusions can be reached, but the study
raises important questions about the emphasis
on chimpanzees as the model for human
origins. “If the rate is higher then they should
have indeed diverged more from a common
ancestor,” says Eisen. “Bonobos might be
more similar to the common ancestor of
humans, chimps and bonobos than chimpan-
zees are and thus make a better model for
learning about early human evolution.”
In the final scene, Shakespeare has
Prospero come to recognise himself in his
monster and free him from bondage. “This
thing of darkness,” he says of Caliban, “I
acknowledge mine.” Prospero’s journey is
much like our own. Whatever reason Western
society had to be repulsed by apes, whether
for destabilising our position at the centre of
the natural world or merely because they were
so “disproportion’d in manners and in shape”
as to remind us of our lowly origin, prithee
never mind. The killer-ape is our own creation
and by holding on to this myth we are
chaining ourselves to a pessimistic vision of
human nature. We may be risen apes, but this
need not reduce the better angels of our
nature. In the end, by releasing Prospero’s
monster, we are releasing ourselves. l
Eric Michael Johnson has a master’s degree
in evolutionary anthropology focusing on
great ape behavioural ecology. He is currently
a doctoral student in the history of science at
the University of British Columbia.
21 April 2011 Times Higher Education 39