Anyone who
has watched much nature
television knows that
orangutans are by far the
handsomest and
smartest-looking of the great
apes. They're literal
highbrows, with wide, soulful
eyes and broad expressive
foreheads. They're covered not
with bathmat fur, like so many
apes, but with what amounts to
a couture pelt -- red hair so
long and fine it seems
blow-dried. It's true that
orangutans drag their knuckles
when they walk, but how else
are you going to get around if
your arms are longer than your
legs? For creatures so large,
they are uncommonly graceful,
not to mention sweet-natured,
so it's gratifying to learn
that a team of scientists,
writing in the journal
Science, has recently
certified them as ''cultured''
as well. Metaphorically at
least, the news makes you want
to extend a cheerful hand to
your fellow primate and pump
him by his auburn, hirsute paw
(it would feel sort of like
angora, I'm guessing).
Culture in
this sense is not exactly a
museum or concert-hall
accomplishment. It's behavior
that's not genetically
determined but, rather,
learned by watching others;
certain styles of tool use,
for example, or systems of
social signaling. The theory
is that if animals in one
place do something a certain
way, for no particular reason,
and the same animals someplace
else do not, then chances are
that behavior is cultural, not
instinctive.
In the wild,
orangutans tend to be loners,
and therefore it was believed
that they lacked a ''system of
socially transmitted behavior.''
But after studying various
orangutan populations in
Borneo and Sumatra, the
authors of the Science article
concluded that some of them
did indeed show signs of
having taught each other
stuff. They had learned how to
masturbate with sticks, for
example -- male and female
alike -- and to make ritual
''raspberry'' noises at
bedtime before scaling into
their nests. They had also
mastered the art of creating
funny sounds by blowing into
leaves, and of catching rides
in Robert Frost fashion, by
swinging on bent-over tree
snags. This is all it takes --
a few useless but highly
amusing tricks -- to promote
you into the highest rank of
primates: the elite group that
also includes chimpanzees,
most likely bonobos and
gorillas and of course us --
the naked apes, to use Desmond
Morris's label.
Morris was
the British zoologist who in
1967, when most scientists and
philosophers were still trying
to draw distinctions between
man and beast, shocked
everyone by declaring that
Homo sapiens, hairlessness
notwithstanding, was still an
ape and thought and behaved
like one. ''Behind the facade
of modern city life there is
the same old naked ape,''
Morris wrote. ''Only the names
have been changed: for
'hunting' read 'working,' for
'hunting grounds' read 'place
of business' . . . for 'pair
bond' read 'marriage.' '' Our
biggest problem, Morris added,
is that man prides himself on
having the biggest brain of
all the primates ''but
attempts to conceal the fact
that he also has the biggest
penis, preferring to accord
this honor falsely to the
mighty gorilla . . . and it is
high time we examined his
basic behavior.''
In Morris's
analysis, much of that
behavior consisted of trying
to deal with the cruel
contradictions of pair-bonding
and gorillalike hypersexuality.
On one hand, we wanted to
retain a single mate, so we
became exquisitely and
inventively sensual; we turned
the female breasts into
substitutes for the buttocks
and figured out how to have
frontal intercourse. (This is
the epochal moment
memorialized by Rae Dawn Chong
and Everett McGill in ''Quest
for Fire,'' the 1981 movie on
which Morris served as a
consultant.) On the other
hand, we couldn't be going ape
(sexually speaking) all the
time, so we had to invent
deodorant and the unspoken
prohibition against looking
people in the eye on the
subway.
Some of
Morris's ideas now seem more
than a little wacky. (He
claimed, for example, that
after orgasm the breast of the
female naked ape increases in
size by up to 25 percent.) But
Morris gave rise eventually to
E.O. Wilson and sociobiology,
and no one doubts for a minute
anymore that many of our
social and behavioral traits
are rooted in biological and
evolutionary imperatives. We
are a lot more animal than we
used to think.
In the years
since Morris, meanwhile, a
number of other scientists
have been working to erase the
man-animal distinction from
the other end -- to suggest,
for example, that language may
not be unique to humans, and
that primates may have
culture, something we also
believed was uniquely ours.
Considering what we think
we've learned about our own
natures, though, what's
fascinating about the
orangutan discoveries is how
little of their learned
behavior has to do with sexual
customs (masturbating with
sticks aside) and how much
with what amounts to just
plain goofing off.
Not all the
orangutans' cultural
accomplishments were
pointless. The scientists
found them using leaves as
gloves and as napkins, and
wielding tools to extract
seeds and to probe into tree
cavities. But the Science
article includes a table
rating the behaviors in order
of frequency, and at the top
of the list are the
branch-riding, the various
kinds of noisemaking,
scratching games and building
nests just for playing in --
all of which, when you think
of it, have human equivalents.
At bedtime we nuzzle our
infant children on the stomach
to make the raspberry sound --
that universal cultural
signal, it turns out, at once
fond and silly; we teach kids
to make a squeaky noise by
blowing on a blade of grass;
we throw a bedspread over a
card table so they can play
house. To amuse them (and
ourselves), we scratch and mug
and sometimes act like
complete orangutans. Primates
that we are, we presumably
learned long ago that our
nature at its most essential
consists of being able to
entertain someone, and of
being entertained in return.
Charles McGrath is the
editor of The New York Times
Book Review.