The Crazy Apes: A Satire of Human Society

Our Ancestral Cousins

Africa is where it all began some millions of years ago, or at least that's what anthropologists tell us. All school children learn about the Out-of-Africa theory, of how our ancestors were born there, slowly migrated to other continents and spread all over the world. It took millions of years, but that's probably how it happened. All evidence found to date supports the theory.

It started with the great apes, also known as hominids, the family that includes humans, gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and gibbons. Apes are large primates that lack a tail, and that's why monkeys are excluded from our great big family. Our common ancestry goes back ten or more million years, when hominins, orangutans, and gorillas evolved into distinct species. It was only a mere few million years ago that the hominin subfamily subdivided into three distinct species: humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos. The latter two are our ancestral cousins.

While the world's population of great apes is at seven and a half billion, most of them belong to the human specie. Non-human apes account for much less than one million! It's a startling reality, considering that even a million years ago the numbers would have been about equal.

It might be repugnant to some to be associated with the great apes, but scientists tell us that less than 2% of our DNA differentiates us from them, most of which still live in jungles, mountains, and savannas, as do some of our brethren in the Amazonian jungle who still live in the wild, largely untouched by civilization, although the numbers are rapidly diminishing. I mention the Amazon because I had the privilege of traveling there, but there are many more places in the world where our brothers and sisters still live more or less the same life as our cousins the chimpanzees. They live in blissful ignorance of the modern problems that afflict us civilized apes.

Much like our own specie, it takes about nine months for babies of our distant cousins to be born and 12 to 18 years to achieve adulthood. However, the fertility rate for non-human apes is much lower than ours; and that accounts, in part, why the human population exploded and theirs didn't. Hunting was also a significant factor in modern times.

Millions of chimpanzees used to live throughout equatorial Africa but only two to three hundred thousand are left, and their population is decreasing rapidly. They live in communities ranging from ten to one hundred, in which all members know each other, but feed, travel, and sleep in much smaller groups. The makeup of these groups changes frequently, suggesting a much more flexible social order than ours, but they do have a hierarchy, and generally each community has an alpha male who is considered the most powerful member of the group – a tribal leader. Chimp chains of command do not reflect a rigid pecking order, but are complex and change often. Females will mate with more than one male, and all her partners share in the support of the offspring.

Chimpanzees spend a large part of their day looking for food and eating, but they do not wander aimlessly through the forest to find it. They know exactly when and where to go to pick it. In addition to their regular diet, they may eat certain plants for their medicinal value, such as to soothe an upset stomach or get rid of intestinal parasites.

Here's a few more interesting Chimp facts:

All but 1.4% of their DNA is the same as ours, making them our closest living relative.

They communicate with one another through a complex system of vocalizations, facial expressions, body postures, and gestures.

They make and use stone tools to crack nuts, twigs to probe for insects or honey, spears to hunt small mammals, and sponges made of leaves to soak up drinking water from hard-to-reach places: similar to stone-age-technology humans.

Some chimpanzees have learned to communicate with humans using sign language. Some have even combined signs to come up with new words. For example, the first time a trained chimpanzee saw a swan she called it a 'water bird'.

Like humans, they use facial expressions to convey emotions.

Their senses of sight, taste, and hearing are similar to ours.

They not only have opposable thumbs like us, but they also have opposable big toes, so they can grab things with their hands and their feet.

Chimpanzees can live for more than 50 years, which was similar to humans until modern times.

Humans have advanced enormously since the Stone Age, but deep down we're still the same creatures. That enormous change, most of which occurred in the past century, has been too rapid for our physiology to adapt to it, and unlike our distant cousins who haven't experienced it to the same degree, we're the worse for it, in more ways than one.

How?

We'll find out with the help of our two chimp cousins, who will also point out the errors of our ways.