On the edge of extinction: why western chimpanzees matter – photo essay (a quoted piece)
Throughout history, the erroneous intuition that humans are radically different (even superior) to other animals has been used to justify our exploitative attitude towards nature. By holding a mirror up to ourselves, apes force us to abandon this “human exceptionalism”. In 1758, the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus not only dared to place humans alongside monkeys and apes within the “primate” order, but even assigned humans and apes the same genus, Homo. Later genomic analyses would vindicate Linnaeus’s intuition, confirming that indeed chimpanzees and bonobos are more similar to humans than to gorillas. Our striking parallels with chimps become evident when considering almost any aspect of our biology. For instance, our immune systems are so alike that many infectious diseases that affect humans are also able to infect chimps, gestation also lasts around nine months, and infants have a prolonged childhood (up to 10-12 years) where they need to remain close to their mother and learn a set of skills that will be crucial in their adult life. At the same time, almost weekly we are shown new evidence suggesting that tool use, empathy and other capacities widely believed to be exclusive to our species are also present in other primates. As Darwin suspected, the gap between humans and apes (once thought an impassable abyss) seems to be “one of degree, and not of kind”. By fixing humans firmly within the animal kingdom, our ape relatives provided us with the right framework to understand our place in nature, and replace our dismissive attitude towards other animals with one founded on respect and curiosity. Paradoxically for the self-appointed “thinking ape”, we’ve been so obsessed with finding what makes humans “uniquely human” that only recently we’ve started to appreciate what makes chimps “uniquely chimpanzee”.
Why is it that so many fail to see the commonality with humans in such species and rather simply dismissing them as 'just animals'?
Throughout history, the erroneous intuition that humans are radically different (even superior) to other animals has been used to justify our exploitative attitude towards nature. By holding a mirror up to ourselves, apes force us to abandon this “human exceptionalism”. In 1758, the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus not only dared to place humans alongside monkeys and apes within the “primate” order, but even assigned humans and apes the same genus, Homo. Later genomic analyses would vindicate Linnaeus’s intuition, confirming that indeed chimpanzees and bonobos are more similar to humans than to gorillas. Our striking parallels with chimps become evident when considering almost any aspect of our biology. For instance, our immune systems are so alike that many infectious diseases that affect humans are also able to infect chimps, gestation also lasts around nine months, and infants have a prolonged childhood (up to 10-12 years) where they need to remain close to their mother and learn a set of skills that will be crucial in their adult life. At the same time, almost weekly we are shown new evidence suggesting that tool use, empathy and other capacities widely believed to be exclusive to our species are also present in other primates. As Darwin suspected, the gap between humans and apes (once thought an impassable abyss) seems to be “one of degree, and not of kind”. By fixing humans firmly within the animal kingdom, our ape relatives provided us with the right framework to understand our place in nature, and replace our dismissive attitude towards other animals with one founded on respect and curiosity. Paradoxically for the self-appointed “thinking ape”, we’ve been so obsessed with finding what makes humans “uniquely human” that only recently we’ve started to appreciate what makes chimps “uniquely chimpanzee”.
Why is it that so many fail to see the commonality with humans in such species and rather simply dismissing them as 'just animals'?
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