Like alike

Saturday, 17th July. Semliki Time: 09:43pm

So here’s an admission for you. I don’t actually like chimpanzees. Now, don’t get me wrong, I find them absolutely fascinating, but I don’t like them. Unfortunately aimed urination aside, this is predominantly for one reason. They’re too much like humans. If you accept the evidence in vogue at the moment, chimpanzees diverged from humans about six million years ago. A slightly more cautious estimate says that our last common ancestor pottered about Africa some five to seven million years ago. To put that into perspective, molecular estimates put the last shared ancestor of the two known sub-species of orang-utan about 1.5 million years ago and chimpanzees and bonobos parted ways a good three million years ago. The point I’m trying to make is that six million years isn’t such a long time in evolutionary terms, and with the chimps, it shows. Their expressions, the light behind their eyes, the way they react to each other is both incredibly human and unsettlingly animal-like. For me, chimps fall slap-bang in the middle of uncanny valley. Freud, eat your heart out.

I also find their similarity to humans quite depressing. Chimpanzee behaviour, while not nearly as predicable as that of less behaviourally ‘complicated’ organisms such as fruit flies, still conforms to various predictable patterns. When it is profitable for a chimpanzee to bully her subordinates, she will do so. If it's in a chimps best interest to kill and eat the infants of a neighbour's community, those infants should probably quake in their boots. Their similarity to us, coupled with their predictable nastiness always drives home the point that humans are only nice to each other when it suits them. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not naïve enough to argue that each and every individual, specific act of human kindness has a biologically determined situational evolutionary benefit. Mrs Rosatia Migsworth at number three doesn't look after Mr Hawthorn’s moggie Peter every other day because the scheming old lady expects her investments to return with interest. These just-so stories tarnish evolutionary psychology textbooks and riddle the pages of cosmo. No, what I’m trying to say is that a general proclivity towards sweetness, light and loving one's neighbour only exists because, by and large, it’s beneficial. When things start going wrong, you can be sure that even humans will turn as bad as they need too. After the fallout clears, Rosatia will hack her path through her starving fellow kin to defend access to the last tins of irradiated Heinz. The ones that don’t follow suit may not last. At least, this sort of thing is what I unavoidably start to think when I’m around chimps.

Incoherent musings on the evolutionary philosophy of morality aside, the other reason I don’t actually like chimpanzees is that the blackguards spent the whole day running away from me. We saw them very early today at ten past seven. I pulled out my notebook and they vanished. After an hour of tearing through the brambly undergrowth in the sweltering African heat, being bitten by insects, loosing my water bottle, almost falling down a steep slope and smashing my face into a tree, the familiar hooting was heard. Again, I produced the notebook, again I looked up and saw the part majestic, part clumsy animals above me, again they swung swiftly away. This time their trail took us up a dried up riverbed, over wobbly tree roots across the side of a cliff and through the sweltering sun-drenched savanna. The tracks through the grass turned round and headed back the way we had come. On our return we saw that the chimps, after leading us on a wild goose chase miles through the forest, had returned to an area very close to the camp, finished off all the fruit and escaped. Some day maybe they’ll be fully habituated to humans. Unless, that is, a frustrated human finishes them off first.