From John Bintliff, University of Durham
Your feature “Making a monkey of human nature” by Meredith Small (10 June) seems to rest on a giant non sequitur, and little-else, to make its argument convincing … “that our primate roots lie in the flexible social and mating systems of the New World monkeys rather than the cercopithecines”.
Small reminds us that the expanding interest shown in Old World primate behaviour, from the 1960s on, related to a wider research front focusing on the origins of human social behaviour. In particular, two tendencies that sadly characterise much of human history – status division between individuals and the subordination and diminished mobility of females – rather than being quirky features of recent cultural development, might have been present in the earliest hominids.
Perhaps, it was argued, the environmental circumstances in which early hominids arose in Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the selection for a particular kind of social structure adapted to that environment, could explain the similarities between baboon behavioural patterns and those regrettable traits so typical of humans.
In contrast, Small prefers to highlight an alternative model for human behaviour, based on the New World monkeys with “their lack of hierarchies and their broader ranges of social structures”. Of course, all models for early human behaviour based on primate ethology are worth consideration. But why discard the baboon for the ecologically and geographically far less appropriate New World monkeys? Presumably because the researchers promoting the revisionist viewpoint find New World social behaviour a more appropriate model for human behaviour.
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I find this approach weak on logic but strong on political correctness. What if our propensity to dominate each other, particularly males to females, is deeply-rooted in the very origins of the human species? Running away from this disturbing possibility – across the Atlantic in this case – seems to me to risk losing our ability to own up to our problematic social nature. It was Thomas Buxley who challenged us to face up to the worst, potential implications of our primate origins, so that through that awareness we could direct our cultural skills at counteracting the negative inheritance of that descent. Have we lost the courage to confront that challenge today?
