Slanted Science

We won the war. The other great apes – gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees – put up a good fight in the evolutionary battles, but in the end we were victorious. It’s why we now have iPhones, whereas they are left with whoop-, holler- and buttock-based communication systems.

Well, we have to report that there are humans out there – traitors to our species, one might wish to call them – who are actively teaching apes how to use cigarette lighters. And not in the good, smoky, cancery way either. No, they are teaching these evolutionary losers how to use the lighter to make, and control, their own fires.

May God have mercy on our souls.

The movie ‘Planet Of The Apes‘ tells the story of a group of human astronauts who arrive on a planet thousands of years after they left earth. On this world, humans are the bottom rung of the ladder known as Great Apes. We are mute, grunting imbeciles, while the other apes are cultured and intellectual.

Of course – Spoiler Alert – it turns out that the space-travelers got their calculations wrong and had ended up back on their own home planet where, in the intervening millenia, mankind had somehow screwed up its position as top-ape, leading to a catastrophic (for us) role reversal.

As Charlton Heston so magnificently puts it as he spies the tip of the Statue of Liberty:

We finally really did it. You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you. God damn you all to hell.

And what does all that nonsense have to do with science news? Well, Jill Pruetz, an anthropologist at Iowa State University, reveals in an upcoming research paper that chimpanzees – unlike most animals – do not fear wildfires in their neighborhood.

She monitored a group of chimps in Senegal during the traditional fire-setting season (this practice helps clear ground for new crops, as well as fertilizing the earth already used for growing). Pruetz found that there were no signs of stress or panic amongst the chimps as the fires approached. Rather, they seemed to calmly monitor its progress, calculating its future movement and simply moving out of its way as it went past.

As Pruetz says, they were in fact more relaxed about the whole thing than she was:

They [the chimps] were experts at predicting where it was going to go. I could predict it, sort of, but if it were just me, I would have left. At one time, I actually had to push through them because I could feel the heat from the fire that was on the side of me and I just wasn’t that comfortable with it.

So chilled out were the chimps, she says, that the alpha male even has a specific dance which he performs at the oncoming fire.

This work has implications for understanding how humans gained mastery over flames. Pruetz notes:

If chimps can understand and predict the movement of fire, then maybe that’s the thing that allowed some of the very earliest bipedal apes [our ancestors] to eventually be able to control fire.

Now, all this would be just fine if that’s where it ended. After all, though they may not fear wildfires, at least they can’t go around starting their own just for fun. Or can they…

Check out this video, showing Susan Savage-Rumbaugh working with bonobo apes. The fun starts at 6 minutes into the film, when one of the apes takes a cigarette lighter out of Susan’s pocket, scoots over to some nearby sheets of wastepaper, and begins to calmly set them alight.

Go back and read that sentence again, it won’t change.

Meanwhile, Susan’s commentary merrily predicts the apes’ upcoming world domination:

He’s very interested in fire. He doesn’t do it [start fires] yet without a lighter, but I think that if he saw someone do it he might be able to make a fire without a lighter.

For god’s sake, woman, get out of there! And shoot them all before you leave!

Don’t Hold Your Breath, But This May Lead To: Planet of the Apes coming to be seen as a very prescient documentary.