Dec 04 2009
The Chimpanzee – A Pre-Religious, Highly Social Species
While chimpanzees build no churches in which they bow down to an invisible alpha, they do engage in some behaviors that could be considered pre-religious. For example, chimpanzees will make threat displays at an approaching thunderstorm, as if attempting to bluff it away. In this case they have extended a natural propensity beyond the domain of real agents, where a threat might produce results, to the domain of non-agents (storms), where the threat will absolutely not produce results in the form of influencing the behavior of the target entity.
I will develop and discuss this aspect of chimpanzee psychology — and possibly our evolutionary heritage as it pertains to superstitious and religious behavior — in a future series of posts in my Almighty Alpha project. The title to that series: “The Buds of Religious Behavior.”
In the near term, we will continue our examination of whether or not the chimpanzee deserves identification as the truest proto-human and thus legitimate focus of evolutionary psychology. The following three bits of information illustrate why I believe Pan troglodytes is the best candidate for providing clues to the evolution of human behavior, including religious stories and rituals.
1. “Unlike monkeys, who in most cases have a rigid social structure, chimpanzees have a very loose social structure.” (4)
Groups and leaders seem to be temporary. Both chimp and human. Can a I get an “amen” from the congregation? Or will there be an attempted coup instead? But wait! I’m just speaking for the Big Guy.
2. Not only is “Chimpanzee social behavior…the most plastic and human like among that of existing nonhuman primates,” but chimpanzees share the what seems to be the bulk of social emotions that humans display. (5)
Case in point: chimpanzee mothers who experience a death of their infant frequently drag around the lifeless body for days on end. While no human mother does this literally, the figurative equivalent can occur for months and even years on end.
3. “Mutual grooming is interdependent. Moreover, unlike other primates, chimpanzees engage in social grooming cliques and clusters, which is far more complex than the usual grooming dyad [of other primates] (Nakamura, 2003).” (6)
This is noteworthy because simple, uni-directional grooming establishes a relatively straightforward relationship of greater and lesser. But mutual and social grooming? This class of behavior seems to be a blunt instrument next the precise meaning of dominance relations. Okay, you value our relationships, and we are “in this together.” But what do we expect from one another and in what circumstances. How is this an advance? The instrument becomes many-purposed. But this necessitates an intelligence and capacity for learning the appropriate ways to use it.
The incredible brain growth and intelligence in human evolution was first attributed to advanced tool use. Seeing that hominid tool kits, and, presumably, tool use, varied little over hundreds of thousands of years, that idea has pretty much been discredited. Lately the reasoning for human brain growth has focused on social intelligence. Homo sapiens tend to live in not only larger social groups than other primates, but in groups with vastly more complicated relationships. Like chimpanzees, but more so.
Still, we have yet to take a good look at another very close primate relative: the bonobo, or “pygmy chimpanzee.” That’s where we next turn.
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(4) Bourne, H., The Ape People, Putnam, New York, 1971.
(5) Power, M. The Egalitarians: Human and Chimpanzee, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991, p. 7
(6) McCrew, W. C., The Cultured Chimpanzee: Reflections on Cultural Primatology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 135
