UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, APRIL 2013From massacres of schoolchildren to terrorist detonations to garden-variety homicides, human violence looms omnipresent in many awful shades. But we need only look to one of our closest primate cousins to understand that we are not alone in our propensity for carnage. Like humans, chimpanzees also rape, murder, and even wage rudimentary war.
In the last 20 years, primatologists, rightly impressed by the genetic closeness and behavioral continuities between “us and them,” have resurrected the old idea (albeit now clothed in more sophisticated terms) of our emergence from “killer-ape” ancestors. But even though there is no question of the heuristic value of primate models, if employed to the exclusion of other data, they can never yield sufficient scenarios of human evolution. This is because our ancient human forebears left behind a rich archaeological record of their activities—a record that cannot be ignored and that, in many ways, does not accord with the behavior of extant nonhuman primates.
My book Rough and Tumble appreciates the vital role of primate ethology for elucidating our past. But it also acknowledges the ...
