Apes, Humans, And Everything In Between
The fascinating world of anthrozoology
She just sat on the ground. After having a meal she had come here, to the edge of the small forest, to find some rest on a hot summer day. Looking around, it came to her mind how much she really liked this place. She was surrounded by the mighty branches of trees several times taller as herself.
The thick layers of green leaves above and around her made her feel protected and safe. Actually, she didn’t know why just this particular spot made her feel that way. Maybe it was because she already had been here very often, probably since her childhood.
But that did not matter much for her. She just took a deep breath, and as fresh air filled her lungs, she became calm and relaxed.
Then, her eyes met something crawling on the ground. There, just next to her right leg, some surprisingly large bugs were moving around, their silvery colors shining in the bright sunlight. They were scrambling fast but with no apparent goal. She pulled her leg away from the tiny creatures because she did not want them to touch her — or, even worse, crawl around on her skin.
But she became curious. Scratching her head she stood up and took a very close look at those bugs as she watched their movements. She grabbed one of them and held the creature right in front of her eyes.
With a sudden movement, she put it in her mouth and crushed it with her teeth. As she chewed it up and it swallowed down, she really liked the taste and was already hungry for more …
Apparently, the protagonist of this short piece of fiction is not a human woman or girl. Nor is she an ape, though one might be reminded of Pierre Boulle’s 1963 novel La Planète des singes (better known today through the Planet of the Apes series).
No, I imagined her to be something completely different: a creature not human and not ape, but something in between. I thought of one of our very distant ancestors, strictly speaking a specimen of the species Australopithecus afaransis. Meaning “southern ape from Afar”, the name was first used by — obviously human — scholars in the year 1978. You may know the species’ most prominent individual: famous Lucy, the fossil remains of a female A. afaransis individual who lived around 3.2 million years ago in the Afar region of Ethiopia in Eastern Africa.
It’s not really important wether our bug eating protagonist might be identical with Lucy or not, so I leave this decision up to you (it’s said Lucy was named after the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” — after all, being more an AC/DC fan I would call her “Rosie” if I gave her a name).
For me this story is about something else: A. afarensis and the biological genus Australopithecus in general combined characteristics of apes and humans. While their brain size was comparable to modern chimpanzees, their ability to walk upright was more developed, at least pointing in the direction of the human way to move. Science has found out a lot about these creatures, but we are far from having an insight into their brain — their ways of thinking, feeling and — most of all — how they perceived and experienced the world surrounding them.
This is partly because Australopithecus lived millions of years ago, but I doubt we would know more if some of its specimen had survived to the present day. In fact, we do not know much for certain even about the minds of present day animals. Furthermore, how much we know about our own human minds would be another question — since I started reading about human-animal studies (or anthrozoology) I wondered if we ever will be able to understand animal minds at all.
Tons of studies have been published about this question. A good overview of this topic here on medium is the story “Can we know what animals are thinking?”.
In my view we still almost know nothing about animal minds. We believe, we guess and we interpret what we observe or measure. But we cannot put ourselves in their position (see Thomas Nagel’s fundamental study “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, published in the 1974 volume of The Philosophical Review). To anthropomorphize animals is a constant threat for any human observer.
Not going into details here, there are only two aspects that seem to be clear to me: first, at least certain animals are sentient. They can feel and show emotions such as pleasure or fear, and they can experience pain. Of course, dogs, cats and pigs do — but what about other animals such as fish or insects? Though research does deliver some hints, up to this day there is no real answer to this question (at least I think so). The same applies to other aspects such as consciousness, self-awareness or self-control.
Animals communicate, sometimes by vocalization, and some even show certain forms of what we call culture. Some keywords and keyphrases are here: toolmaking, passing knowledge to the next generation or developing traditions.
The second aspect that is quite clear to me is one thing animals lack: They have just a rudimental concept of time and absolutely no understanding of historical periodization. For our own mindset, the idea of “history” (or the succession of past, present and future) is absolutely fundamental.
So, can we identify in this absence of a certain capability a definite difference between us and all the other animals? Not quite. Some human individuals also lack the ability to understand the concept of time, such as newborn, mentally disabled people or dementia sufferers. This is why quite some scholars even criticize the concept of biological species as insufficient.
In the end, we are all animals — human or non-human. I have used the pronouns “we” and “us” in a seemingly natural way. Speaking of “humans” and “human” traits of course I mean specimen of our own species Homo sapiens. Of course that´s because I am H. sapiens myself, being quite sure that exclusively other individuals of that species might read this text (if any). As platitudinous as this might sound, it is another important aspect. No non-human animal would ever reflect or philosophize about the nature of different species’ minds.
Ironically, at this moment in time my bottom line for this story is just this: The more a H. sapiens individual tries to reflect and to understand, the less he or she seems to know — and the more he or she might turn back millions of years of evolution, feeling just like a bug eating Australopithecus.
I honestly do not know which of the two might be the happier one.
