Frans de Waal is a name almost no-one has heard of unless you are in the academic world of primate studies, and yet his observations and research have revolutionized our understanding of humans’ place in the evolutionary ladder – we are much closer to chimps than some of us would like to admit. Chimps, in fact, show reconciliation traits that we humans could learn a lot from.
Frans de Waal died this month at the age of 75, after a lifetime of studying chimps, bonobos and capuchins. It is poignant here to point out that chimps and bonobos only differ by 1.5% of their DNA compared to humans.
However, de Waal’s breakthrough came in studies for his dissertation many years previously in the 1970’s. He was observing a couple of young male chimps at Burger’s Zoo in Arnhem, Holland, when he noticed that, after running around their compound screaming and baring their teeth at each other in a very aggressive manner, it became obvious that one had lost to the other, whatever the conflict was about. He saw something astonishing. One held out his hand to the other, as if to say “Let’s make it up”. In a minute they had swung down to a main fork of the tree, where they embraced and kissed. He immediately called that action reconciliation. It was obvious the chimp community could not survive continued conflict so reconciliation was completely natural and a survival technique.
His use of the word reconciliation scandalized his tutors, and he was lucky that they approved his continuing studies – European doctoral studies are normally all about research, no coursework, and, if your research is not seen as significant, your doctoral committee can deny you your degree. Frans was determined to produce the scientific evidence necessary to silence the sceptics.
He produced hundreds of experiments, hours of video and reams of data to prove that every emotion humans felt, other primates felt too. When he looked into the eyes of a chimpanzee, an intelligent and self-assured personality looked back. Charles Darwin had felt the same when he saw tickled chimps laugh, just as his children did.
One of the surprising traits he documented in chimps was fairness. He videoed two capuchins in two, separate, adjoining, cages. They were each given a task of handing stones out to the researcher. At first, they were rewarded with a slice of juicy cucumber. But then one was rewarded with a grape. The slighted capuchin noticed and got uneasy. When it happened again the slighted monkey went wild, hurled its slice of cucumber out of the cage, shook the bars and did its best to grab the bowl of grapes.
Politics was a field his subjects excelled at, and in surprisingly subtle ways. Savagery played no part in chimpanzee leadership contests. Instead, deals were struck and alliances nurtured with gifts of food, or the favors of certain females. The alfa males in the group was not always the biggest or the strongest, but the best at plotting. Frans wrote the first of his 17 books and called it “Chimpanzee Politics”. Apparently Newt Gingrich, when he was leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, declared it should be read by all congressional freshmen.
Frans also recorded altruism: the matriarch, too old to walk, helped across an enclosure and into a tree by other females, or a group of males licking the wounds of a defeated warrior. He saw males providing child-care when females were absent, even slowing their pace through the forest to let the little ones keep up. Perhaps most moving was the clear empathy of a female bonobo who, finding an injured bird, climbed to the top of the tallest tree with it and spread its wings to encourage it to fly.
Summing up his work, Frans de Waal thought he had raised apes up a bit and brought humans down. In today’s climate of chaos in the U.S. House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich’s idea might bear fruit, which is ironic in that his ideas also began the era of radical-right confrontation.
