Jared Diamond - Rise & Fall Of Third Chimpanzee - 1991.pdf

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Jared Diamond, The rise and fall of the
third chimpanzee. 1991
©Jared Diamond 1991
The rights of Jared Diamond to be identified as
Author of this work has been asserted by Jared Diamond in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
All rights reserved
This edition first published in 1991 by Radius
Random Century Group Ltd 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA
Random Century Australia (Pty) Ltd 20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney, NSW 2061, Australia
Random Century New Zealand Ltd PO Box 40-086, Glenfield, Auckland 10, New Zealand
Random Century South Africa (Pty) Ltd PO Box 337, Bergvlei, 2012, South Africa
BRITISH LIBRARY
ATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
C
Diamond, Jared
The rise and fall of the third chimpanzee. I. Title
573.2
ISBN 0-09-174268-4
Photoset by Speedset Ltd, Ellesmere Port
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Butler and Tanner Ltd, Frome, Somerset
Dedicated to my sons
Max and Joshua, to help them understand
where we came from and where we may be heading
THEME
How the human species changed, within a short time, from just another species of big mammal
to a world conqueror;
and how we acquired the capacity
to reverse all that progress overnight
CONTENTS
Prologue 1
PART ONE : JUST ANOTHER SPECIES OF BIG MAMMAL 9
1 A Tale of Three Chimps 12
2 The Great Leap Forward 27
PART TWO: AN ANIMAL WITH A STRANGE LIFE CYCLE 49
3 The Evolution of Human Sexuality 56
4 The Science of Adultery 72
5 How We Pick Our Mates and Sex Partners 84
6 Sexual Selection, and the Origin of Human Races 95
7 Why Do We Grow Old and Die? 106
PART THREE : UNIQUELY HUMAN 121
8 Bridges to Human Language 125
Appendix: Neo-Melanesian in One Easy Lesson 150
9 Animal Origins of Art 152
10 Agriculture's Two-Edged Sword 163
11 Why Do We Smoke, Drink, and Use Dangerous Drugs? 173
12 Alone in a Crowded Universe 184
PART FOUR: WORLD CONQUERORS 197
13 The Last First Contacts 202
14 Accidental Conquerors 213
15 Horses, Hittites, and History 225
Appendix: A proto-Indo-European Fable 248
16 In Black and White . 250
Appendix: Indian Policies of Some Famous Americans 277
PART FIVE: REVERSING OUR PROGRESS OVERNIGHT 279
17 The Golden Age that Never Was 285
18 Blitzkrieg and Thanksgiving in the New World 304
19 The Second Cloud 313
EPILOGUE : Nothing Learned, and Everything Forgotten? 327
Further Reading 333
Acknowledgements 354
Index 355
MAPS
page
World Conquest 42
Axes of the Old and New Worlds 222
Language of Europe and Western Asia Map 228
A Sheep is a Sheep is a Sheep 234
Honourable Root, Dishonourable Word 235
How Indo-European Languages Might Have Spread 243
Some Genocides, 1492-1900
256
257
Some Genocides, 1900-1950
258
Some Genocides, 1950-1990
FIGURES
Family Tree of the Higher Primates
17
30
The Human Family Tree
60
Males, as Females See Them
61
Females, as Males See Them
ILLUSTRATION
Ishi, the last surviving Indian of the Yahi tribe
271
PROLOGUE
It is obvious that humans are unlike all animals. It is also obvious that we are a species of big
mammal, down to the minutest details of our anatomy and our molecules. That contradiction is the
most fascinating feature of the human species. It is familiar, but we still have difficulty grasping
how it came to be and what it means.
On the one hand, between ourselves and all other species lies a seemingly unbridgeable gulf that
we acknowledge by defining a category called'animals'. It implies that we consider centipedes,
chimpanzees, and clams to share decisive features with each other but not with us, and to lack
features restricted to us. Among these characteristics unique to us are the abilities to talk, write,
and build complex machines. We depend completely on tools, not just on our bare hands, to make
a living. Most of us wear clothes and enjoy art, and many of us believe in a religion. We are
distributed over the whole Earth, command much of its energy and production, and are beginning
to expand into the ocean depths and into space. We are also unique in darker attributes, including
genocide, delight in torture, addictions to toxic drugs, and extermination of other species by the
thousands. While a few animal species have one or two of these attributes in rudimentary form
(like tool use), we still far eclipse animals even in those respects.
Thus, for practical and legal purposes, humans are not animals. When Darwin intimated in 1859
that we had evolved from apes, it is no wonder that most people initially regarded his theory as
absurd and continued to insist that we had been separately created by God. Many people,
including a quarter of all American college graduates, still hold to that belief today.
On the other hand, we obviously are animals, with the usual animal body parts, molecules, and
genes. It is even clear what particular type of animal we are. Externally, we are so similar to
chimpanzees that eighteenth-century anatomists who believed in divine creation could already
recognize our affinities. Just imagine taking some normal people, stripping off their clothes, taking
away all their other possessions, depriving them of the power of speech, and reducing them to
grunting, without changing their anatomy at all. Put them in a cage in the zoo next
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD CHIMPANZEE
to the chimp cages, and let the rest of us clothed and talking people visit the zoo. Those speechless
caged people would be seen for what we all really are: a chimp that has little hair and walks
upright. A zoologist from outer space would immediately classify us as just a third species of
chimpanzee, along with the pygmy chimp of Zaire and the common chimp of the rest of tropical
Africa.
Molecular genetic studies over the last half-a-dozen years have shown that we continue to share
over ninety-eight per cent of our genes with the other two chimps. The overall genetic distance
between us and chimps is even smaller than the distance between such closely related bird species
as red-eyed and white-eyed vireos, or willow warblers and chiffchaffs. So we still carry most of
our old biological baggage with us. Since Darwin's time, fossilized bones of hundreds of creatures
variously intermediate between apes and modern humans have been discovered, making it
impossible for a reasonable person to deny the overwhelming evidence. What once seemed absurd
- our evolution from apes - actually happened.
Yet the discoveries of many missing links have only made the problem more fascinating, without
fully solving it. The few bits of new baggage we acquired — the two per cent of our genes that
differ from those of chimps - must have been responsible for all of our seemingly unique
properties. We underwent some small changes with big consequences rather quickly and recently
in our evolutionary history. In fact, as recently as a hundred thousand years ago that zoologist
from outer space would have viewed us as just one more species of big mammal. Granted, we had
a couple of curious behavioural habits, notably our control of fire and our dependence on tools,
but those habits would have seemed no more curious to the extraterrestrial visitor than would the
habits of beavers and bowerbirds. Somehow, within a few tens of thousands of years - a time that
is almost infinitely long when measured against one person's memory but is only a tiny fraction of
our species' separate history - we had begun to demonstrate the qualities that make us unique and
fragile.
What were those few key ingredients that made us human? Since our unique properties appeared
so recently and involved so few changes, those properties or at least their precursors must already
be present in animals. What are those animal precursors of art and language, of genocide and drug
abuse?
Our unique qualities have been responsible for our present biological success as a species. No
other large animal is native to all the continents, or breeds in all habitats from deserts and the
Arctic to tropical rainforests. No large wild animal rivals us in numbers. But among our unique
qualities are two that now jeopardize our existence: our propensities to kill each other and to
destroy our environment. Of course, both
_ 9 _
PROLOGUE
propensities occur in other species: lions and many other animals kill their own kind, while
elephants and others damage their environment. However, these propensities are much more
threatening in us than in other animals because of our technological power and exploding
numbers.
There is nothing new about prophecies to the effect that the end of the world is near if we do not
repent. What is new is that such a prophecy is now true, for two obvious reasons. First, nuclear
weapons give us the means to wipe ourselves out quickly: no humans possessed this means before.
Second, we already appropriate about forty per cent of the Earth's net productivity (that is, the net
energy captured from sunlight). With the world's human population now doubling every forty-one
years, we will soon have reached the biological limit to growth, at which point we will have to
start fighting each other in deadly earnest for a slice of the world's fixed pie of resources. In
addition, given the present rate at which we are exterminating species, most of the world's species
will become extinct or endangered within the next century, but we depend on many species for our
own life support.
Why rehearse these familiar depressing facts? Why try to trace the animal origins of our
destructive qualities? If they really are part of our evolutionary heritage, that seems to imply that
they are genetically fixed and hence unchangeable.
In fact, our situation is not hopeless. Perhaps the urge to murder strangers or sexual rivals is innate
in us, but that still has not prevented human societies from attempting to thwart those instincts,
and from succeeding in sparing most people the fate of being murdered. Even taking two world
wars into account, proportionately far fewer people have suffered violent deaths in twentieth-
century industrialized states than in stone-age tribal societies. Many modern populations enjoy
longer lifespans than did humans of the past. Environmentalists do not always lose in battles with
developers and destroyers. Even some genetic infirmities, such as phenylketonuria andjuvenile-
onset diabetes, can now be mitigated or cured. Therefore, my purpose in rehearsing our situation is
to help us avoid repeating our mistakes - to use knowledge of our past and our propensities in
order to change our behaviour. That is the hope behind the dedication of this book. My twin sons
were born in 1987 and will reach my present age in the year 2040. What we are doing now is
shaping their world.
It is not the goal of this book to propose specific solutions to our predicament, because the
solutions we should adopt are already clear in broad outline. Some of those solutions include
halting population growth, limiting or eliminating nuclear weapons, developing peaceful means
for solving international disputes, reducing our impact on the

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