48 | NewScientist | 4 June 2011

CULTURELAB

Among African Apes: Stories and photos from the field, edited by Martha Robbins and Christophe Boesch, University of California Press, £20.95/$29.92

Reviewed by Rowan Hooper

IF YOU like to think of chimps as wise, rational tool-users, gorillas as gentle giants, or bonobos as sexed-up hippie apes, be prepared for a shock. Among

African Apes, a collection of field diaries, is primatology given the Tarantino treatment.

In the introduction, Martha Robbins of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, emphasises that extreme violence among primates is rare. The incidents described in the book stuck in the biologists’ minds because they illustrate how aggression can influence ape society. They stuck in my mind too because, infrequent as they are, these are clearly not random episodes, but key moments in the lives of characters who behave in such familiar ways that we see ourselves in them.

In the course of the book we learn about infanticide and violent infighting among silverback gorillas. We get to know Mlima, a gorilla the biologists have been observing almost daily for six years. Through diary entries we are there when they find her dying from wounds inflicted by a younger member of her own species.

We also meet Volker, an ambitious young bonobo the researchers have followed for most of his life. Volker has close relations with Amy, a female

bruised, throat torn open and intestines dragged out.

“I feel as though I am looking at a person who has been murdered in a savage attack,” she writes. As she takes this in, the band of chimps return to the corpse, and the biologists retreat to watch. Afterwards, Head’s team finds the dead male’s penis and testicles some 30 metres away – ripped off, she speculates, as part of an emasculation ritual. The incident was so human in so many ways that she wonders: “Is our ‘moral code’ nothing more than a controlling system that humans have invented to keep some order in society?”

The answer is surely yes. So much in human culture is echoed in what we see in other apes. This book reveals unforgettably that these apes have personalities, that their societies are political and complex, and most of all that – if we need a reason – we cannot let them go extinct. Understanding them will help us understand ourselves.

Ape versus apeExtreme violence among our primate cousins casts a chilling light on our own nature

Desert in the forestDucktown Smoke by Duncan Maysilles, University of North Carolina Press, £34.95/$39.95

Reviewed by Fred Pearce

DUCKTOWN is part of poor America. Home to just 400 people, it is tucked in the south-eastern corner of Tennessee, not far

from Chattanooga. Yet a century ago this tiny town made legal history – for the environmental showdown over “Ducktown smoke”. As Duncan Maysilles shows, it was the battle that made US environmental law pretty much from scratch.

In the 1850s, Ducktown saw a copper rush that turned a landscape of lush Appalachian hardwood forests into what became known as the Ducktown desert – perhaps the only desert in the world with more than a metre and a half of rain each year.

To make the sulphur-rich copper ore useful, the mining companies first burned off the sulphur – by chopping down trees to fuel open pyres that roasted the metal and burned for months. These perpetual infernos filled the air with smoke and sulphurous fumes that lingered in the valleys and spread for tens of kilometres. Acid rain – though the term wasn’t invented then – did the rest, killing the remaining vegetation and washing away the soil, leaving naked red gullies.

By the 1890s, copper mining had spread into neighbouring Georgia and North Carolina, engulfing farms as well as wooded hillsides. The state of Georgia began what became a decade-long legal action against the Tennessee Copper Company to force an end to open roasting. Doggedly pursued by lawyer-turned-scientist Ligon Johnson, it was the first environmental suit to make it to the US Supreme Court. Though

whose baby the researchers believe he fathered, but the attention he pays her is finally punished: he is savagely beaten by his former friends. The biologists observe Volker’s screaming face as he clings to a tree trunk, then never see him again.

Josephine Head, also of the Max Planck Institute, describes how she tracked a trail of blood from where chimps had been vocalising loudly the night before, and made a horrible discovery: the spread-eagled body of an adult male chimp, his face battered and

“These aren’t isolated acts of violence, but key moments in the lives of characters much like us”

CLiv

E BR

oM

hA

LL/g

ETT

y