The Naked Ape (23 page)

There will of course be exceptions to this rule individuals who are professional concerned with making large numbers of personal contacts, people with behaviour defects that make them abnormally shy or lonely, or people whose special psychological problems render them unable to obtain the expected social rewards from their friends and who try to compensate for this by frantic ‘socialising’ in all directions. But these types account for only a small proportion of the town and city populations. All the rest happily go about their business in what seems to be a great seething mass of bodies, but which is in reality an incredibly complicated series of interlocking and overlapping tribal groups. How little, how very little, the naked ape has changed since his early, primitive days.

THE feeding behaviour of the naked ape appears at first sight to be one of his most variable, opportunistic, and culturally susceptible activities, but even here there are a number of basic biological principles at work. We have already taken a close look at the way his ancestral fruit-picking patterns had to become modified into co-operative prey-killing. We have seen how this led to a number of fundamental changes in his feeding routine. Food-seeking had to become more elaborate and carefully organised. The urge to kill prey had to become partially independent of the urge to eat. Food was taken to a fixed home base for consumption. Greater food preparation had to be carried out. Meals became larger and more spaced out in time. The meat component of the diet became dramatically increased. Food storage and food sharing was practised. Food had to be provided by the males for their family units. Defecation activities had to be controlled and modified.

All these changes were taking place over a very long period of time, and it is significant that, despite the great technological advances of recent years, we are still faithful to them. It would seem that they are rather more than mere cultural devices, to be buffeted this way and that by the whims of fashion. Judging by our present-day behaviour, they must, to some extent at any rate, have become deep-seated biological characteristics of our species. As we have already noted, the improved food collecting techniques of modern agriculture have left the majority of the adult males in our societies without a hunting role. They compensate for this by ‘going out to work’. Working has replaced hunting, but has retained many of its basic characteristics. It involves a regular trip from the home base to the ‘hunting’ grounds. It is a predominantly masculine pursuit, and provides opportunities for male-to-male interaction and group activity. It involves taking risks and planning strategies. The pseudo-hunter speaks of ‘making a killing in the City’. He becomes ruthless in his dealings. He is said to be ‘bringing home the bacon’.

When the pseudo-hunter is relaxing he goes to all-male ‘clubs’, from which the females are completely excluded. Younger males tend to form into all-male gangs, often ‘predatory’ in nature. Throughout the whole range of these organisations, from learned societies, social clubs, fraternities, trade unions, sports clubs, masonic groups, secret societies, right down to teenage gangs, there is a strong emotional feeling of male ‘togetherness’. Powerful group loyalties are involved. Badges, uniforms and other identification labels are worn. Initiation ceremonies are invariably carried out with new members. The unisexuality of these groupings must not be confused with homosexuality. They have basically nothing to do with sex. They are all primarily concerned with the male-to-male bond of the ancient cooperative hunting group. The important role they play in the lives of the adult males reveals the persistence of the basic, ancestral urges. If this were not so, the activities they promote could just as well be carried on without the elaborate segregation and ritual, and much of it could be done within the sphere of the family units. Females frequently resent the departure of their males to ‘join the boys’, reacting to it as though it signified some kind of family disloyalty. But they are wrong to do so. All they are witnessing is the modern expression of the age-old male-grouping hunting tendency of the species. It is just as basic as the male-female bonding of the naked ape and, indeed, evolved in close conjunction with it. It will always be with us, at least until there has been some new and major genetic change in our make-up.

Although working has largely replaced hunting today, it has not completely eliminated the more primitive forms of expression of this basic urge. Even where there is no economic excuse for participating in the pursuit of animal prey, this activity still persists in a variety of forms. Big-game hunting, stag-hunting, fox-hunting, coursing, falconry, wild-fowling, angling and the hunting-play of children are all contemporary manifestations of the ancient hunting urge.

It has been argued that the true motivation behind these present-day activities has more to do with the defeating of rivals than the hunting down of prey; that the desperate creature at bay represents the most hated member of our own species, the one we would so like to see in the same situation. There is undoubtedly an element of truth in this, at least for some individuals, but when these patterns of activity are viewed as a whole it is clear that it can provide only a partial explanation. The essence of ‘sport-hunting’ is that the prey should be given a fair chance of escaping. (If the prey is merely a substitute for a hated rival, then why give him any chance at all?) The whole procedure of sport-hunting involves a deliberately contrived inefficiency, a self-imposed handicap, on the part of the hunters. They could easily use machine guns, or more deadly weapons, but that would not be ‘playing the game’—the hunting game. It is the challenge that counts, the complexities of the chase and the subtle manoeuvres that provide the rewards.

One of the essential features of the hunt is that it is a tremendous gamble and so it is not surprising that gambling, in the many stylised fortes it takes today, should have such a strong appeal for its. Like primitive hunting and sport-hunting, it is predominantly a male pursuit and, like them, it is surrounded by seriously observed social rules and rituals.

An examination of our class structure reveals that both sport-hunting and gambling are more the concern of the lower and upper social classes than of the middle classes, and there is a very good reason for this if we accept them as expressions of a basic hunting drive. I pointed out earlier that work has become the major substitute for primitive hunting but as such it has most benefited the middle classes. For the average lower-class male, the nature of the work he is required to do is poorly suited to the demands of the hunting drive. It is too repetitive, too predictable. It lacks the elements of challenge, luck and risk so essential to the hunting male. For this reason, lowerclass males share with the (non-working) upper-class males a greater need to express their hunting urges than do the middle classes, the nature of whose work is much more suited to its role as a hunting substitute.

Leaving hunting and turning now to the next act in the general feeding pattern, we come to the moment of the kill. This element can find a certain degree of expression in the substitute activities of work, sport-hunting and gambling. In sport-hunting the action of killing still occurs in its original form, but in working and gambling contexts it is transformed into moments of symbolic triumph that lack the violence of the physical act. The urge to kill prey is therefore considerably modified in our present-day way of life. It keeps reappearing with startling regularity in the playful (and not so playful) activities of young boys, but in the adult world it is subjected to powerful cultural suppression.

Two exceptions to this suppression are (to some extent) condoned. One is the sporthunting already mentioned, and the other is the spectacle of bullfighting. Although vast numbers of domesticated animals are slaughtered daily, their killing is normally concealed from the public gaze. With bull-fighting the reverse is the case, huge crowds gathering to watch and experience by proxy the acts of violent prey-killing.

Within the formal limits of blood-sports these activities are permitted to continue, but not without protest. Outside these spheres, all forms of cruelty to animals are forbidden and punished. This has not always been the case. A few hundred years ago the torture and killing of ‘prey’ was regularly staged as a public entertainment in Britain and many other countries. It has since been recognised that participation in violence of this kind is liable to blunt the sensitivities of the individuals concerned towards all forms of blood-letting. It therefore constitutes a potential source of danger in our complex and crowded societies, where territorial and dominance restrictions can build up to an almost unbearable degree, sometimes finding release in a flood of pent-up aggression of abnormal savagery.

We have so far been dealing with the earlier stages of the feeding sequence and their ramifications. After hunting and killing, we come to the meal itself. As typical primates we ought to find ourselves munching away on small, non-stop snacks. But we are not typical primates. Our carnivorous evolution has modified the whole system. The typical carnivore gorges itself on large meals, well spaced out in time, and we clearly fall in with this pattern. The tendency persists even long after the disappearance of the original hunting pressures that demanded it. Today it would be quite easy for us to revert to our old primate ways if we had the inclination to do so. Despite this, we stick to well-defined feeding times, just as though we were still engaged in active prey-hunting. Few, if any, of the millions of naked apes alive today indulge in the typical scattered feeding routine of the other primates. Even in conditions of plenty, we rarely eat more than three, or at the very most four times a day. For many people, the pattern involves only one or two large daily meals. It could be argued that this is merely a case of cultural convenience, but there is little evidence to support this. It would be perfectly possible, given the complex organisation of food supplies that we now enjoy, to devise an efficient system whereby all food was taken in small snacks, scattered throughout the day. Spreading feeding out in this way could be achieved without any undue loss of efficiency once the cultural pattern became adjusted to it, and it would eliminate the need for the major disruptions in other activities caused by the present ‘main meal’ system. But, because of our ancient predatory past, it would fail to satisfy our basic biological needs.

It is also relevant to consider the question of why we heat our food and eat it while it is still hot. There are three alternative explanations. One is that it helps to simulate ‘prey temperature’. Although we no longer consume freshly killed meat, we nevertheless devour it at much the same temperature as other carnivore species. Their food is hot because it has not yet cooled down: ours is hot because we have re-heated it. Another interpretation is that we have such weak teeth that we are forced to ‘tenderise’ the meat by cooking it. But this does not explain why we should want to eat it while it is still hot, or why we should heat up many kinds of food that do not require ‘tenderising’. The third explanation is that, by increasing the temperature of the food, we improve its flavour. By adding a complicated range of tasty subsidiaries to the main food objects, we can take this process still further. This relates back, not to our adopted carnivory, but to our more ancient primate past. The foods of typical primates have a much wider variety of flavours than those of carnivores. When a carnivore has gone through its complex sequence of hunting, killing and preparing its food, it behaves much more simply and crudely at the actual crunch. It gobbles; it bolts its food down. Monkeys and apes, on the other hand, are extremely sensitive to the subtleties of varying tastiness in their food morsels. They relish them and keep on moving from one flavour to another. Perhaps, when we heat and spice our meals, we are harking back to this earlier primate fastidiousness. Perhaps this is one way in which we resisted the move towards full-blooded carnivory.

Having raised the question of flavour, there is a misunderstanding that should be cleared up concerning the way we receive these signals. How do we taste what we taste? The surface of the tongue is not smooth, but covered with small projections, called papillae, which carry the taste buds. We each possess approximately 10,000 of these taste buds, but in old age they deteriorate and decrease in number, hence the jaded palate of the elderly gastronome. Surprisingly, we can only respond to four basic tastes. They are: sour, salt, bitter and sweet. When a piece of food is placed on the tongue, we register the proportions of these four properties contained in it, and this blending gives the food its basic flavour. Different areas of the tongue react more strongly to one or other of the four tastes. The tip of the tongue is particularly responsive to salt and sweet, the sides of the tongue to sour and the back of the tongue to bitter. The tongue as a whole can also judge the texture and temperature of the food, but beyond that it cannot go. All the more subtle and varied ‘flavours’ that we respond to so sensitively are not, in fact, tasted, but smelt. The odour of the food diffuses up into the nasal cavity, where the olfactory membrane is located. When we remark that a particular dish ‘tastes’ delicious, we are really saying that it tastes and smells delicious. Ironically, when we are suffering from a heavy cold and our sense of smell is severely reduced, we say that our food is tasteless. In reality, we are tasting it as clearly as we ever did. It is its lack of odour that is worrying us.

Having made this point, there is one aspect of our true tasting that requires special comment, and that is our undeniably prevalent ‘sweet-tooth’. This is something alien to the true carnivore, but typically primate-like. As the natural food of primates becomes riper and more suitable for consumption, it usually becomes sweeter, and monkeys and apes have a strong reaction to anything that is strongly endowed with this taste. Like other primates, we find it hard to resist ‘sweets’. Our ape ancestry expresses itself, despite our strong meat-eating tendency, in the seeking out of specially sweetened substances. We favour this basic taste more than the others. We have ‘sweet shops’, but no ‘sour shops’. Typically, when eating a full-scale meal, we end the often complex sequence of flavours with some sweet substance, so that this is the taste that lingers on afterwards. More significantly, when we occasionally take small, inter-meal snacks (and thereby revert, to a slight extent, to an ancient, primate scatter-feeding pattern), we nearly always choose primate sweet food objects, such as candy, chocolate, ice cream, or sugared drinks.