The rise and fall of the third chimpanzee

If some of the words look strangely familiar but do not quite make sense, read the advertisement aloud to yourself, concentrate on the sounds, and ignore the strange spelling. As the next step, here is the same advertisement rewritten with English spelling: Come inside long store belong me-fellow—store belong sellim altogether something—me-fellow can helpim you long catchim what-name something you likim, big-fellow na liklik, long good-fellow price. He-got good-fellow kind cargo long buyim, na he-got staff long helpim you na lookoutim you long time you come inside long this-fellow store.

A few explanations should help you make sense of the remaining strangenesses. Almost all the words in this sample of Neo-Melanesian are derived from English, except for the word liklik for 'little', derived from a New Guinean language (Tolai). Neo-Melanesian has only two pure prepositions: bilong, meaning 'of or 'in order to', and long, meaning almost any other English preposition. The English consonant/becomes p in Neo-Melanesian, as in stap for 'staff, andpe/a for 'fellow'. The suffix -pela is added to monosyllabic adjectives (hencegutpela for 'good', bikpela for 'big'), and also makes the singular pronouns 'me' and 'you' into plural ones (for 'we' and 'you'—plural). Na means 'and'. So the advertisement means:

Come into our store—a store for selling everything—we can help you get whatever you want, big and small, at a good price. There are good types of goods for sale, and staff to help you and look after you when you visit the store.

NINE ANIMAL ORIGINS OF ART

Art is often viewed as lacking animal precursors, cultivated solely for pleasure, and serving no biological function. In fact, even art experts have been unable to distinguish human artworks from those produced by apes and elephants. Like the bower decorations of bowerbirds, human art may have evolved as a signal of status and thereby helped us to pass on our genes. Georgia O'Keeffe's drawings were slow to win recognition for her, but Siri's drawings brought her acclaim as soon as other knowledgeable artists saw them. 'They had a kind of flair and decisiveness and originality'—that was the first reaction of the famous abstract- expressionist painter Willem de Kooning. Jerome Witkin, an authority on abstract expressionism who teaches art at Syracuse University, was even more effusive: 'These drawings are very lyrical, very, very beautiful. They are so positive and affirmative and tense, the energy is so compact and controlled, it's just incredible. . This drawing is so graceful, so delicate. . This drawing indicates a grasp of the essential mark that makes the emotion.

Witkin applauded Siri's balance of positive and negative space, and her placement and orientation of images. Having seen the drawings but knowing nothing about who made them, he guessed correctly that the artist was female and interested in Asian calligraphy. But Witkin did not guess that Siri was 8 feet tall and weighed 4 tons. She was an Asian elephant who drew by holding a pencil in her trunk. de Kooning's response to being told Siri's identity was, 'That's a damned talented elephant. Actually, Siri was not extraordinary by elephant standards. Wild elephants often use their trunks to make drawing motions in the dust, while captive elephants often spontaneously scratch marks on the ground with a stick or stone. Hanging in many doctors' and lawyers' offices are paintings by an elephant named Carol, who sold dozens of her works at prices of up to 500 dollars. Supposedly, art is the noblest distinctively human attribute—one that sets us apart from animals at least as sharply as does spoken language, by differing in basic ways from anything that any animal does. Art ranks as even nobler than language, since language is really 'just' a highly sophisticated advance on animal communication systems, serves an obvious biological function in helping us to survive, and obviously developed from the sounds made by other primates. In contrast, art serves no such transparent function, and its origins are considered a sublime mystery. But it is clear that elephant art could have implications for our own. At the minimum, it is a similar physical activity resulting in products that even experts could not distinguish from human products accepted as constituting art. Of course, there are also huge differences between Siri's art and ours, not least of which is that Siri was not trying to communicate her message to other elephants. Nevertheless, we cannot just dismiss her art as a quirk of one individual beast.

In this chapter I shall go beyond elephants to examine art-like activities of some other animals. I believe that the comparisons will help us understand the original functions of human art. Thus, although we usually consider art to be the antithesis of science, there may really be a science of art.

To appreciate that our art must have some animal precursors, recall from Chapter One that it is only about seven million years since we branched off from our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees. Seven million years sound like a lot on the scale of a human lifetime, but they are barely one per cent of the history of complex life on Earth. We still share over ninety-eight per cent of our genes with chimps. Art and those other features that we consider uniquely human must be due to just a tiny fraction of our genes. They must have arisen only a few moments ago on the evolutionary time clock.

Modern studies of animal behaviour have been shrinking the list of features once considered uniquely human, so much so that most differences between us and so-called animals now appear to be only matters of degree. For example, I described in Chapter Eight how vervet monkeys have a rudimentary language. You may not have considered vampire bats allied with us in nobility, but they prove to practise ^reciprocal altruism regularly (towards other vampire bats, of course). ^m°ⁿg our darker qualities, murder has now been documented in innumerable animal species, genocide in wolves and chimps, rape in ^Ucks and orangutans, and organized warfare and slave raids in ants.

As absolute distinctions between us and animals, these discoveries leave us few characteristics besides art, which we managed to dispense with for the first 6,960,000 of the seven million years since we diverged from chimps. Perhaps the earliest art forms were wood carving and body painting, but we would not know because they are not preserved. The first preserved, even questionable, hints of human art consist of some flower remains around Neanderthal skeletons, and some scratches on animal bones at Neanderthal campsites. However, their interpretation as having been arranged or scratched intentionally is in doubt. Not until the Cro-Magnons, beginning around 40,000 years ago, do we have unequivocal evidence for art surviving in the form of the famous cave paintings, statues, necklaces, and musical instruments. If we are going to claim that true art is unique to humans, then in what ways do we claim that it differs from superficially similar productions of animals, like bird-songs? Three supposed distinctions are often put forward: that human art is non-utilitarian, that it is only for aesthetic pleasure, and that it is transmitted by learning rather than through our genes. Let's scrutinize these claims more closely.

Firstly, as Oscar Wilde said, 'All art is quite useless. The implicit meaning a biologist sees behind this quip is that art is non-utilitarian in a narrow sense employed within the fields of animal behaviour and evolutionary biology. That is, human art does not help us to survive or to pass on our genes, which are the readily discernible functions of most animal behaviour. Of course, most human art is utilitarian in the broader sense that the artist thereby communicates something to fellow humans, but transmitting one's thoughts to the next generation is not the same thing as transmitting one's genes. In contrast, bird-song serves the obvious functions of wooing a mate, defending a territory, and thereby transmitting genes.

Regarding the second claim that human art is instead motivated by aesthetic pleasure, Webster's dictionary defines art as 'the making or doing of things that have form or beauty'. While we cannot ask mockingbirds and nightingales if they similarly enjoy the form or beauty of their songs, it is suspicious that they sing mainly during the breeding season. Hence they are probably not singing just for aesthetic pleasure. As for human art's third claimed distinction, each human group has a distinctive art style, and the knowledge of how to make and enjoy that particular style is learned, not inherited. For example, it is easy to distinguish typical songs being sung today in Tokyo and in Paris. But those stylistic differences are not hard-wired in our genes, as are the differences, say, in the eyes of Parisians and Japanese. Parisians and Japanese can and often do visit each other's cities and learn each other's songs. In contrast, many species of birds (the so-called nonpasserine birds) inherit the knowledge of how to produce and respond to the particular song of their species. Each of those birds would produce the right song even if it had never heard it, and even if it had heard only the songs of other species. It is as if a French baby adopted by Japanese parents, flown in infancy to Tokyo, and educated there began spontaneously to sing the