The World Without Us

Or were they simply going forth and multiplying, like any beast presented with rich resources, such as grasslands stretching all the way to Asia? As Darwin came to appreciate, it didn’t matter: when isolated groups from the same species proceed in their separate ways, the most successful among them learn to flourish in new surroundings. Exiles or adventurers, the ones who survived filled Asia Minor and then India. In Europe and Asia, they began to develop a skill long known to temperate creatures like squirrels but new to primates: planning, which required both memory and foresight to store food in seasons of plenty in order to outlast seasons of cold. A land bridge got them through much of Indonesia, but to reach New Guinea and, about 50,000 years ago, Australia, they had to learn to become seafarers. And then, 11,000 years ago, observant Homo sapiens in the Middle East figured out a secret until then known only to select species of insects: how to control food supplies not by destroying plants, but by nurturing them.

^{Australopithecus africanus.}

ILLUSTRATION BY CARL BUELL.

Because we know the Middle Eastern origin of the wheat and barley they grew, which soon spread southward along the Nile, we can guess that—like shrewd Jacob returning with a cornucopia of gifts to win over his powerful brother, Esau—someone bearing seeds and the knowledge of agriculture returned from there to the African homeland. It was an auspicious time to do so, because yet another ice age—the last one—had once again stolen moisture from lands that glaciers didn’t reach, tightening food supplies. So much water was frozen into glaciers that the oceans were 300 feet lower than today.

At that same time, other humans who had kept spreading across Asia arrived at the farthest reach of Siberia. With the Bering Sea partly emptied, a land bridge 1,000 miles across connected to Alaska. For 10,000 years, it had lain under more than half a mile of ice. But now, enough had receded to reveal an ice-free corridor, in places 30 miles wide. Picking their way around meltwater lakes, they crossed it.

Chambura Gorge and Gombe Stream are atolls in an archipelago that is all that remains of the forest that birthed us. This time, the fragmentation of Africa’s ecosystem is due not to glaciers, but to ourselves, in our latest evolutionary leap to the status of Force of Nature, having become as powerful as volcanoes and ice sheets. In these forest islands, surrounded by seas of agriculture and settlement, the last of Pan priors other offspring still cling to life as it was when we left to become woodland, savanna, and finally city apes. To the north of the Congo River, our siblings are gorillas and chimpanzees; to the south, bonobos. It is the latter two we genetically most resemble; when Louis Leakey sent Jane Goodall to Gombe, it was because the bones and skulls he and his wife had uncovered suggested that our common ancestor would have looked and acted much like chimpanzees.

Whatever inspired our forebears to leave, their decision ignited an evolutionary burst unlike any before, described variously as the most successful and most destructive the world has ever seen. But suppose we had stayed—or suppose that, when we were exposed on the savanna, the ancestors of today’s lions and hyenas had made short work of us. What, if anything, would have evolved in our place?

To stare into the eyes of a chimpanzee in the wild is to glimpse the world had we stayed in the forest. Their thoughts may be obscure, but their intelligence is unmistakable. A chimpanzee in his element, regarding you coolly from a branch of an mbula fruit tree, expresses no sense of inferiority in the presence of a superior primate. Hollywood images mislead, because its trained chimps are all juveniles, as cute as any child. However, they keep growing, sometimes reaching 120 pounds. In a human of similar weight, about 30 of those pounds would be fat. A wild chimpanzee, who lives in a perpetual state of gymnastics, has perhaps three to four pounds of fat. The rest is muscle.

Dr. Michael Wilson, the curly-haired young director of field research at Gombe Stream, vouches for their strength. He has watched them tear apart and devour red colobus monkeys. Superb hunters, about 80 percent of their attempts are successful kills. “For lions, it’s only about one out of 10 or 20. These are pretty bright creatures.”

But he has also seen them steal into the territories of neighboring chimp groups, ambush unwary lone males, and maul them to death. He’s watched chimps over months patiently pick off males of neighboring clans until the territory and the females are theirs. He’s also seen pitched chimpanzee combat, and blood battles within a group to determine who is the alpha male. The unavoidable comparisons to human aggression and power struggles became his research specialty.

“I get tired of thinking about it. It’s kind of depressing.”