PART ONE
JUST ANOTHER SPECIES OF BIG MAMMAL
The clues about when, why, and in what ways we ceased to be just another species of big mammal come from three types of evidence. Part One considers some of the traditional evidence from archaeology, which studies fossil bones and preserved tools, plus newer evidence from molecular biology. Other evidence from studies of living apes and people will be taken up in Parts Two and Three.
One basic question concerns just how extensive the genetic differences between ourselves and chimps are. That is, do we differ in ten, fifty, or ninety-nine per cent of our genes? Merely looking at humans and chimps or counting up visible traits would not be any help, because many genetic changes have no visible effects at all, while other changes have sweeping effects. For example, the visible differences between breeds of dogs such as great danes and pekinese are far greater than those between chimps and ourselves. Yet all dog breeds are interfertile, breed with each other (insofar as it is mechanically feasible) when given the opportunity, and belong to the same species. To a naive observer, the appearance of great danes and pekinese would suggest that they are genetically much further apart than chimps are from humans. Those visible differences among dog breeds in size, proportions, and hair colour depend on relatively few genes which have negligible consequences for reproductive biology. How, then, can we estimate our genetic distance from chimps? Chapter One describes how this problem has been solved only within the past half a dozen years by molecular biologists. The answer is not just intellectually surprising but may also have some practical ethical implications for how we treat chimps. We shall see that gene differences between us and chimps, although large compared to those among living human populations or among breeds of dogs, are still small compared to differences among many other familiar pairs of related species. Evidently, changes in only a small percentage of chimpanzee genes had enormous consequences for our behaviour. It has also proved possible to work out a calibration between genetic distance and elapsed time, and thereby to get an approximate answer to the question of when we and chimps split apart from our common ancestor. That turns out to be somewhere around seven million years ago, give or take a few million years.
While the molecular biological story of the first chapter yields overall measures of genetic distance and elapsed time, it tells us nothing about how specifically we differ from chimps, and when those specific differences appeared. Hence Chapter Two will consider what more can be learned from bones and tools left by creatures variously intermediate between our ape-like ancestor and modern humans. The changes in bones constitute the traditional subject matter of physical anthropology. Especially important were our increase in brain size, skeletal changes associated with walking upright, and decreases in skull thickness, tooth size, and jaw muscles.
Our large brain was surely prerequisite for the development of human language and innovativeness. One might therefore expect the fossil record to show a close parallel between increased brain size and sophistication of tools. In fact, the parallel is not at all close. This proves to be the greatest surprise and puzzle of human evolution. Stone tools remained very crude for hundreds of thousands of years after we had undergone most of our expansion of brain size. As recently as 40,000 years ago, Neanderthals had brains even larger than those of modern humans, yet their tools show no signs of innovativeness and art. Neanderthals were still just another species of big mammal. Even for tens of thousands of years after some other human populations had achieved virtually modern skeletal anatomy, their tools too remained as boring as those of Neanderthals.
These paradoxes sharpen the conclusion drawn from Chapter One. Within the modest percentage of genes that differs between us and chimps, there must have been an even smaller percentage of genes which were not involved in the shapes of our bones, but which were responsible for the distinctively human traits of innovation, art, and complex tools. At least in Europe, those traits appear unexpectedly suddenly, at the time of the replacement of Neanderthals by Cro-Magnons. That is the time when we finally ceased to be just another species of big mammal. In Chapter Two I shall speculate about what those few changes were that triggered our steep rise to human status.
ONE
A TALE OF THREE CHIMPS
The next time that you visit a zoo, make a point of walking past the ape cages. Imagine that the apes had lost most of their hair, and imagine a cage nearby holding some unfortunate people who had no clothes and couldn't speak but were otherwise normal. Now try guessing how similar those apes are to ourselves genetically. For instance, would you guess that a chimpanzee shares ten, fifty, or ninety-nine per cent of its genes with humans?
Then ask yourself why those apes are on exhibit in cages, and why other apes are being used for medical experiments, while it is not permissible to do either of those things to humans. Suppose it turned out that chimps shared 99.9 % of their genes with us, and that the important differences between humans and chimps were due to just a few genes. Would you still think it is okay to put chimps in cages and to experiment on them? Consider those unfortunate mentally-defective people who have much less capacity to solve problems, to care for themselves, to communicate, to engage in social relationships, and to feel pain, than do apes. What is the logic that forbids medical experiments on those people, but not on apes?
You might answer that apes are 'animals', while humans are humans, and that is enough. An ethical code for treating humans should not be extended to an 'animal', no matter what percentage of its genes it shares with us, and no matter what its capacity for social relationships or for feeling pain. That is an arbitrary but at least self-consistent answer that cannot be lightly dismissed. In that case, learning more about our ancestral relationships will not have any ethical consequences, but it will still satisfy our intellectual curiosity to understand where we come from. Every human society has felt a deep need to make sense of its origins, and has answered that need with its own story of the Creation. The Tale of Three Chimps is the creation story of our time.
For centuries it has been clear approximately where we fit into the animal kingdom. We are obviously mammals, the group of animals characterized by having hair, nursing their young, and other features. Among mammals we are obviously primates, the group of mammals including monkeys and apes. We share with other primates numerous traits lacking in most other mammals, such as flat fingernails and toenails rather than claws, hands for gripping, a thumb that can be opposed to the other four fingers, and a penis that hangs free rather than being attached to the abdomen. Already by the Second Century AD, the Greek physician Galen deduced our approximate place in Nature correctly when he dissected various animals and found that a monkey was 'most similar to man in viscera, muscles, arteries, veins, nerves and in the form of bones'. It is also easy to place us within the primates, among which we are obviously more similar to apes than to monkeys. To name only one of the most visible signs, monkeys sport tails, which we lack along with apes. It is also clear that gibbons, with their small size and very long arms, are the most distinctive apes, and that orangutans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and humans are all more closely related to each other than any of them is to gibbons. But to go further with our relationships-proves unexpectedly difficult. It has provoked an intense scientific debate, which revolves around three questions including the one that I posed in the first paragraph of this chapter: What is the detailed family tree of relationships among humans, the living apes, and extinct ancestral apes? For example, which of the living apes is our closest relative? When did we and that closest living relative, whichever ape it is, last share a common ancestor? What fraction of our genes do we share with that closest living relative? At first, it would seem natural to assume that comparative anatomy had already solved the first of those three questions. We look especially like chimpanzees and gorillas, but differ from them in obvious features such as our larger brains, upright posture, and much sparser body hair, as well as in many more subtle points. However, on closer examination these anatomical facts are not decisive. Depending on what anatomical characters one considers most important and how one interprets them, biologists differ on whether we are most closely related to the orangutan (the minority view), with chimps and gorillas having branched off our family tree before we split off from orangutans, or whether we are instead closest to chimps and gorillas (the majority view), with the ancestors of orangutans having gone their separate way earlier. Within the majority, most biologists have thought that gorillas and chimps are more like each
