Humans are master meaning generators

A hashtag in the sky above a school at dusk in southern Rhode Island.  

Was it put there intentionally? What does it mean?

For as long as we’ve been writing about exquisite Paleolithic cave paintings and carefully crafted Stone Age tools we’ve been debating their meanings.  And the debate carries on because meaning is difficult to interpret and that’s largely because “what does it mean?” is a loaded question.

“Meaning” is a hallmark of humanity and, as the thinking often goes, it is a unique aspect of Homo sapiens. No other species is discussing meaning with us. We’re alone here. So we’re supposed to be at least mildly shocked when we learn that Neanderthals decorated their bodies with eagle talons. And it’s supposed to be even harder to fathom that Neanderthals marked symbolic thinking on cave walls. But such is the implication of lines marked by Neanderthals in the shape of a hashtag at Gibraltar. 

source: "The Gibraltar Museum says scratched patterns found in the Gorham’s Cave, in Gibraltar, are believed to be more than 39,000 years old, dating back to the times of the Neanderthals. Credit: EPA/Stewart Finlayson"

This sort of meaningful behavior, combined with the fact that many of us are harboring parts of the Neanderthal genome, encourages us to stop seeing Neanderthals as separate from us. But another interpretation of the hashtag is one of mere doodling; its maker was not permanently and intentionally scarring the rock with meaning. These opposing perspectives on meaning, whether it’s there or not, clash when it comes to chimpanzee behavior as well.  

We’ve grown comfortable with the ever-lengthening list of chimpanzee tool use and tool-making skills that researchers are reporting back to us. But a newly published chimpanzee behavior has humans scratching their heads. Chimpanzees in West Africa fling stones at trees and hollow tree trunks. The stones pile up in and around the trees, looking like a human-made cairn (intentional landmark) in some cases.  Males are most often the throwers, pant-hooting as they go, which is a well-known score to various interludes of chimpanzee social behavior. 

source: "Mysterious stone piles under trees are the work of chimpanzees.© MPI-EVA PanAf/Chimbo Foundation"

Until now, chimp behaviors that employ nature’s raw materials—stones, logs, branches, twigs, leaves—have been easy to peg as being “for” a reason. They’re for cracking open nutritious nuts, for stabbing tasty bushbabies (small nocturnal primates), or for termite fishing. But throwing stones at trees has nothing to do with food. If these chimps do it for a reason then it’s a little more esoteric. 

Maybe they do it for pleasure, to let off steam, or to display, or maybe they do it because someone else did it. It may be all of those things at once, and maybe so much more. Maybe you’d call that ritual. Maybe you wouldn’t. Maybe you’d say that they do it because that’s what chimps do in those groups: they walk on their knuckles; they eat certain foods; they make certain sounds; they sleep in certain terms in certain trees; and they do certain things with rocks, like fling them in certain places. Maybe we could just say that this behavior is the way of certain chimpanzees, hardly more mystifying than other behaviors that we’ve come to expect of them.

For comparison, I have certain ways. There are piles of books near my desk. They pile up on tables and shelves. I could fling books on the floor but I don’t. I’m not against flinging them on the floor; it’s just not how things are usually done. I share this behavior with many other, but not all, humans in the presence of books, tables, and shelves.  Until I wrote this paragraph, I never gave it much thought, it’s not something that factors even remotely into how I see the world or my place in it, and yet the piling of books on tables and shelves is quite a conspicuous and, therefore, large part of my daily life.

  

So, why isn’t someone setting up a camera trap in my office and writing up “human accumulative book piling” in Nature? Because this type of behavior, whatever it means, is quintessentially human. No one could claim to discover it in a prestigious publication unless they discovered it in a nonhuman. And they did.

Normally what we do when we learn something new about chimpanzee behavior is we end up crossing one more thing off our list of uniquely human traits. “Man the tool-maker” was nixed decades ago. What should we cross off the list now with this new chimp discovery? Would it be “ritual” and by extension “meaning,” or would it be “piling up stuff”? About that Neanderthal hashtag, do we cross off “art” or “symbolism” and by extension “meaning,” or would we just cross off “doodling,” which holds a quite different meaning? Rather than crossing anything off our list, do we welcome Neanderthals into our kind so we can keep our monopoly on hashtags? Whatever we decide, case by case, trait by trait, we usually interpret our shrinking list of uniquely human traits to be clear demonstration that other animals are becoming more human-like the more we learn about the world.

That’s certainly one way to see it.  But there’s another, more existential, and therefore, arguably, more human way to look at that shrinking list of uniquely human traits: Humans are becoming less human-like the more we learn about the world.

#WhatDoesThatEvenMean #PantHoot #Hashtag #ThisIsMyCaveWall 

Chimps looking back at us

Chimpanzees are our closest genetic relatives, and as such have long been used in medical research, particularly in the kinds of experiments that have been deemed unethical to perform on humans.  They've been used to test vaccines and drugs and new medical procedures, and in psychological and behavioral experiments, and so forth.  Now, in recognition of the similarity chimps have to ourselves, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies in the US is saying that the continued use of our nearest brethren in experimentation is immoral and unethical, and they are recommending that their use be drastically curtailed.  According to the CNN story reporting this:

The IOM recommends that chimps should be used only if the research project cannot be ethically performed on people and that the use of these primates should be allowed only if their use will prevent humans from being treated to a life threatening or debilitating condition.  According to the IOM, aced on these criteria, chimpanzees are not necessary for most biomedical research.  

The IOM also stated that NIH should also limit the use of chimps in behavioral research in studies that provide very few insights into normal and abnormal behavior, mental and emotional health or cognitive skills.  And if the chimps are used in these experiments, NIH should use techniques that do little harm to the animal both physically and mentally. 

The report itself lists these criteria for deciding when their use is deemed moral and appropriate.

The NIH has long banned killing chimps when their usefulness is over, unless they are suffering.  For that reason a number of chimpanzee retirement centers have been established, where chimps are only sent out to pasture metaphorically.  They've got tv's, play areas, all the food they can eat, good medical care, and companionship.  What more could they ask?  Except maybe a good jungle?

Even the latter is provided, after a fashion, by one such place, Chimp Haven, in Louisiana.  There chimpanzees retired from research are given a decent environment in which to live out their natural lives, as described on their web site:

Chimp Haven’s construction began in May 2003 on 200 acres of pristine forest, donated by the local citizens of Caddo Parish, Louisiana. Chimp Haven’s facility includes an interconnected network of bedrooms, outdoor courtyard and play yards, and large, forested habitats up to five acres.

We applaud these new regulations.  As regular readers know, we have often commented on examples of less than useful research being done.  Clinical trials aren't our area, so we can't speak to whether drug testing on chimps is valuable overall, but since a large number of experiments done with humans are let's say inconclusive this must be true for chimps as well, particularly in the psychological or behavioral realm.  It has been said, indeed, that the psychological world of chimps is so different from ours that decades of research on chimps' ability to learn 'language'--meaning human language'--have been a misguided waste of research resources, despite the human interest of the results (that is, that most research along such lines, despite protests of the investigators of course, would fall into the NIH prohibited category).

There is of course the question of the arbitrariness by which we decide what species we can do what to in the lab.  Why just chimpanzees or other great apes? Why not baboons, who are widely used by researchers (including ourselves, though we only look at ones that died naturally and are interested in morphology rather than physiology or behavior)?  What about the long-used (or abused?) rhesus monkeys?  Do they not have a cognitive world in which fear and suffering are included?  If they are so different from us as to be unqualified for special protection, why do we study them?

The question can be, and perhaps should be, extended to all vertebrates, or perhaps all animals.  No one can seriously deny that fish or even insects manifest the signs of fear, though that seems to be the position on which university research review boards act.

There is the interesting case of Neandertals, too, now that their DNA has been sequenced after a fashion (the 'whole genome' sequence available so far is not really the whole genome and it's from a composite of different individual fossils, as far as we are aware).  There has been some salivation over the juicy possibility of cloning a Neandertal, in the sense of replace all the 'genes' (protein coding regions) in a human by those sequenced in Neandertals, and then using that for in vitro fertilization in some donor-incubator (a human?  a chimp?).  Would this be cruelty to the gestator?  And what about the 'Neandertal' thus produced?

Neandertals are, consistent with the fossil record and their genomes, very close to humans in genome structure (90% closer than chimps, relatively speaking).  Essentially, they were human, and debates about whether they could interbreed with those contemporaries who, based on fossils, seem more directly in our line of ancestors, are rather silly.  Indeed, the evidence suggests interbreeding, so that they are direct ancestors.  So, where do we draw the research line?  

Would it be right to clone a Neandertal, even in the artificial sense just described?  Would the new individual be allowed to be experimented on, tested for HIV susceptibility or dissected to see how many lobes in its liver, its brain scanned under various conditions, or put on display?  Or would it have human rights--to go to school, to a human home rather than a cage, to vote?

In the 19th century there were strong moves against the torture of animals by science, called 'anti-vivisection' movements, and their descendants are the animal rights groups today.  There are many legitimate reasons to ask whether we should do any experiments on animals, and whether understanding human biology or disease justifies it.  The response generally is that of course scientists are going to do it whether it's particularly humane or not, but that we do have at least some restraints on the pain and fear etc. we can inflict, and on what species.  Also, of course, we do raise and kill many animals to eat, and we're perfectly sanguine about asphyxiating zillions of fish a day so we can eat them.

So, taking care of chimps seems like an unambiguously good thing to do.  But it does raise deeper questions.