THE NAKED APE

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Guinea tribesmen, but in his own culture he is rapidly forced to become an expert. In themselves these tiny differences of dress and habit are utterly meaningless, but in relation to the game of juggling for position and holding it in the dominance hierarchy they are all-important. We did not evolve, of course, `to live in huge conglomerations of thousands of individuals. Our behaviour is designed to operate in small tribal groups probably numbering well under a hundred individuals. In such situations every member of the tribe will be known personally to every other member, as is the case with other species of apes and monkeys today. In this type of social organisation it is easy enough for the dominance hierarchy to work itself out and become stabilised, with only gradual changes as members become older and die. In a massive city community the situation is much more stressful. Every day exposes the urbanite to sudden contacts with countless strangers, a situation unheard-of in any other primate species. It is impossible to enter into personal hierarchy relationships with all of them, although this would be the natural tendency. Instead they are allowed to go scurrying by, undominated and undominating. In order to facilitate this lack of social contact, anti-touching behaviour patterns develop. This has already been mentioned when dealing with sexual behaviour, where one sex accidentally touches another, but it applies to more than simply the avoidance of sexual behaviour. It covers the whole range of social-relationship initiation. By carefully avoiding staring at one another, gesturing in one another's direction, signalling in any way, or making physical bodily contact, we manage to survive in an otherwise impossibly overstimulating social situation. If the notouching rule is broken, we immediately apologise to make it clear that it was purely accidental. Anti-contact behaviour enables us to keep our number of acquaintances down to the correct level for our species. We do this with remarkable consistency and uniformity. If you require confirmation, take the address or phone books of a hundred widely different types of city-dwellers and count up the number of 162
personal acquaintances listed there. You will find that nearly all of them know well about the same number of individuals, and that this number approximates to what we would think of as a small tribal group. In other words, even in our social encounters we are obeying the basic biological rules of our ancient ancestors. There will of course be exceptions to this ruleindividuals who are professionall concerned with making large numbers of persona contacts, people with behaviour defects that make them abnormally shy or lonely, or people whose special psychological problems render them unable to obtain the expected social rewards from their friends and who try to compensate for this by frantic `socialising' in all directions. But these types account for only a small proportion of the town and city populations. All the rest happily go about their business in what seems to be a great seething mass of bodies, but which is in reality an incredibly complicated series of interlocking and overlapping tribal groups. How little, how very little, the naked ape has changed since his early, primitive days. 163
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THE NAKED APE by Desmond Morris A B
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book is intend
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INTRODUCTION THERE are one hundred
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some respect. If they were healthy,
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CHAPTER ONE ORIGINS THERE is a labe
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we put it, it looks out of place. E
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The primate group, to which our nak
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Faced with a new environment, our a
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complex manoeuvres could be develop
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The brightest stars in the carnivor
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a pack of African hunting dogs it i
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the night, but the contrast is neve
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in the dirt of the den or lair. Aft
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was a process of differential infan
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eating it, each have their own part
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Male and female hunting apes had to
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feature was its naked skin, which l
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home bases, its dens became heavily
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vital missing links in our ancient
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first appears. A great deal will de
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CHAPTER TWO SEX SEXUALLY the naked
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phase, privacy is sought and the su
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summatory act of sperm ejaculation
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the arteries pumping blood into the
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activity. Once the climax has been
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old females will have experienced o
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stay put and mind the babies while
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-the female remains responsive to t
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mucous surfaces permanently exposed
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areas in other animals where there
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Any body relationship, they feel, s
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At some point, back in our ancestry
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sexual contacts. In this particular
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This may also explain why the male
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lengths to render her as sexually r
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ised his sex life. The contemporary
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apology being proportional to the d
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enlarges it, imitating in this way
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ituation where the female is produc
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and avoids being attacked. A subord
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object lacking these signals. Secon
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is that the prolonged period of inf
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on the fundamental sexual structure
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CHAPTER THREE REARING THE burden of
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is not enough for the infant's lips
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mother, either instinctively or by
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apid during the first two years of
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onwards. It may even clasp on to he
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unlike the verbal signals, they eme
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mother's face and to distinguish he
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oth frighteningly odd and at the sa
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friendly, but if we greet them by l
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We develop the vital bond of attach
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Page 109 and 110: CHAPTER FOUR EXPLORATION ALL mammal
Page 111 and 112: But the reverse is actually the cas
Page 113 and 114: are combined, one with another, to
Page 115 and 116: equired no reward-it was its own re
Page 117 and 118: Writing, a formalised offshoot of p
Page 119 and 120: and clothing, in furniture and cars
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Page 123 and 124: epeatedly bite themselves, or pull
Page 125 and 126: on the other hand, of vital signifi
Page 127 and 128: in respiratory activity. Breathing
Page 129 and 130: under the extreme conditions of agg
Page 131 and 132: formalised into rhythmic twistings
Page 133 and 134: sdditional energy on it, and it is
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Page 137 and 138: signal. (With the arm bent and held
Page 139 and 140: intensities of it are expressed in
Page 141 and 142: mechanisms. Many moths have a pair
Page 143 and 144: largely confined now to a form of s
Page 145 and 146: such a situation can be seen to per
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Page 149 and 150: attacker and his enemy, and it is t
Page 151 and 152: intelligence that must get us out.
Page 153 and 154: frequent accompaniment of wailing o
Page 155 and 156: of the `pomp and circumstance' will
Page 157: in profusion. This is usually expla
Page 161 and 162: grounds. It is a predominantly masc
Page 163 and 164: elements of challenge, luck and ris
Page 165 and 166: Another interpretation is that we h
Page 167 and 168: If they appeal to our old primate w
Page 169 and 170: disposal, we might be expected to r
Page 171 and 172: giving an impression of great conce
Page 173 and 174: the female can then fondle it and c
Page 175 and 176: is it aesthetically pleasing. Its f
Page 177 and 178: significance of the hair. In its re
Page 179 and 180: co-operativeness, specialised groom
Page 181 and 182: it is a strong dose of security tha
Page 183 and 184: If the environment becomes too cold
Page 185 and 186: CHAPTER EIGHT ANIMALS UP to this po
Page 187 and 188: prey-predator relationship, since i
Page 189 and 190: substitute space-traveller. No othe
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Page 193 and 194: point of view, are fully justified
Page 195 and 196: small objects (chimpanzee, monkey,
Page 197 and 198: The unexpected discovery here is th
Page 199 and 200: on its back. It must be stressed he
Page 201 and 202: This cannot be explained solely on
Page 203 and 204: spiders being nasty, hairy things.
Page 205 and 206: symbolically, scientifically or aes
Page 207 and 208: tendencies; that if we have to beco
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Heart-beat response: Salk, 1966. Gr
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BIBLIOGRAPHY AMBROSE, J. A., `The s
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MILES, W. R., 'Chimpanzee behaviour
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Mimikry der Primaten'. Die Naturwis
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THE NAKED APE

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