Sex at Dawn

Nor does Pinker include Africa, with its never-ending conflicts, child soldiers, and casual genocides. No mention of Rwanda. Not a Tutsi or Hutu to be found. He leaves out every one of South America’s various twentieth-century wars and dictatorships infamous for torturing and disappearing tens of thousands of civilians. El Salvador? Nicaragua? More than

100,000 dead villagers in Guatemala? Nada. Absolutamente nada.

13. Why War? available online at http://realhumannature.com/ ?page_id=26. After we contacted him to ask how he could possibly justify the omission, Smith at first cited Wrangham and Peterson’s dismissal of bonobos as being less representative than chimps of our last common ancestor. When we pointed out that many primatologists argue that bonobos are probably more representative, that even Wrangham had revised his opinion on the point, and that in any case, it is factually wrong to say that chimps are our “closest non-human relative” without mentioning bonobos, he finally relented and added two brief references to bonobos to his lurid descriptions of chimps’ “bloody wars of attrition.” Since the online essay was an extract from his book, which was already in print, it seems unlikely these reluctant changes are reflected there.

14. Ghiglieri (1999), pp. 104-105.

15. For a review, see Sussman and Garber’s chapter in Chapman and Sussman (2004).

16. The quote is from de Waal (1998), p. 10.

17. Goodall (1971), cited in Power (1991), pp. 28-29.

18. Strangely, even though he agrees with this central point made by Power, de Waal barely mentions her work—and only to dismiss her, at that. In an endnote in his 1996 book, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, he writes, “On the basis of her reading of the literature, Power (1991) has argued that provisioning at some field sites (such as Gombe’s banana camp) turned the chimpanzees more violent and less egalitarian, and thus changed the ‘tone’ of relationships both within and between communities. Power’s analysis—which blends a serious reexamination of available data with nostalgia for the 1960s image of apes as noble savages—raises questions that will no doubt be settled by ongoing research on unprovisioned wild chimpanzees.”

This dismissal of Power’s analysis strikes us as unjustified and uncharacteristically ungenerous. Regardless of whether or not she felt “nostalgia for the 1960s” (an emotion we didn’t detect in her book), de Waal admits her analysis “raises questions” that merit investigation. These questions threaten to recast a great deal of data concerning chimpanzee social interactions—of great interest to de Waal, one of the world’s leading authorities on chimpanzee behavior and a man whose scholarship demonstrates deep respect for critical analysis.

19. Ghiglieri (1999), p. 173.

20. For a review of these reports and a rebuttal to Power’s argument, see Wilson and Wrangham (2003). The paper is available online at http://anthro.annualreviews.org.

21. Nolan (2003).

22. Behar et al. (2008). Also, for an excellent review of this material, see Fagan (2004).

23. Turchin (2003 and 2006).

24. Readers with mental images of Sioux (Lakota) chiefs with eagle-feather war bonnets rippling in the wind should keep in mind that in the generations before first contact with whites, disease spread through many tribes and the arrival of horses brought severe cultural disruptions, leading to conflict between groups that had been at peace previously (see Brown, 1970/2001).

25. Edgerton (1992), pp. 90-104.

26. Ferguson (2003).

27. On Christmas Day, 1968, Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman read this prayer to a world audience: “Give us, O God, the vision which can see thy love in the world in spite of human failure. Give us the faith to trust the goodness in spite of our ignorance and weakness. Give us the knowledge that we may continue to pray with understanding hearts, and show us what each one of us can do to set forth the coming of the day of universal peace. Amen.”

28. Tierney (2000), p. 18. Tierney’s book sparked a conflagration that makes any chimpanzee community seem downright pacific in comparison. The bulk of the controversy concerns Tierney’s charges that Chagnon and his colleague, James Neel, may have caused a fatal epidemic among the Yanomami. Not having examined these charges in detail, we have nothing to add to that discussion, limiting our critique to Changnon’s methodology and scholarship as it applies to Yanomami warfare.