The Mysterious Disappearance of Margaret Power
Even apart from doubts raised by bonobos, there are serious questions worth asking about the nature of chimp “warfare.” In the 1970s, Richard Wrangham was a graduate student studying the relation between food supply and chimp behavior at Jane Goodall’s research center at Gombe, Tanzania. In 1991, five years before Wrangham and Peterson’s Demonic Males came out, Margaret Power published a carefully researched book, The Egalitarians: Human and Chimpanzee, that asked important questions concerning some of Goodall’s research on chimpanzees (without, it must be said, ever expressing anything but admiration for Goodall’s scientific integrity and intentions). But Power’s name and her doubts are nowhere to be found in Demonic Males.
Power noticed that data Goodall collected in her first years at Gombe (from 1961 to 1965) painted a different picture of chimpanzee social interaction than the accounts of chimpanzee warfare she and her colleagues published to global acclaim a few years later. Observations from those first four years at Gombe had left Goodall with the impression that the chimps were “far more peaceable than humans.” She saw no evidence of “war” between groups and only sporadic outbreaks of violence between individuals.
These initial impressions of overall primate peace mesh with research published four decades later, in 2002, by primatologists Robert Sussman and Paul Garber, who conducted a comprehensive review of the scientific literature on social behavior in primates. After reviewing more than eighty studies of how various primates spend their waking hours, they found that “in almost all species across the board, from diurnal lemurs—the most primitive primates—to apes … usually less than 5 percent of their day is spent in any active social behavior whatsoever.” Sussman and Garber found that “usually less than 1 percent of their day is spent fighting or competing, and it’s unusually much less than 1 percent.” They found cooperative, affiliative behavior like playing and grooming to be ten to twenty times more common than conflict in all primate species.15
But Goodall’s impression of relative harmony was to change—not coincidentally, argues Power—precisely when she and her students began giving the chimps hundreds of bananas every day, to entice them to hang around the camp so they could be observed more easily.
In the wild, chimps spread out to search for food individually or in small groups. Because the food is scattered throughout the jungle, competition is unusual. But, as Frans de Waal explains, “as soon as humans start providing food, even in the jungle, the peace is quickly disturbed.”16
The mounds of deliciously smelly fruit locked in reinforced concrete boxes opened only for timed, regular feedings altered the chimps’ behavior dramatically. Goodall’s assistants had to keep rebuilding the boxes, as the frustrated apes found endless ways of prying or smashing them open. Ripe fruit that could not be eaten immediately was a new experience for them—one that left the chimps confused and enraged. Imagine telling a room of unruly three-year-olds on Christmas morning (each with the strength of four adult men) that they’ll have to wait an unspecified amount of time to open the piles of presents they can see right there, under the tree.
Recalling this period a few years later, Goodall wrote, “The constant feeding was having a marked effect upon the behaviour of the chimps. They were beginning to move about in large groups more often than they had ever done in the old days. They were sleeping near camp and arriving in noisy hordes early in the morning. Worst of all, the adult males were becoming increasingly aggressive. … Not only was there a great deal more fighting than ever before, but many of the chimps were hanging around camp for hours and hours every day [emphasis added].”17
Margaret Power’s doubts concerning Goodall’s provisioning of the chimps have been largely left unaddressed by most primatologists, not just Wrangham.18 Michael Ghiglieri, for example, went to study the chimps in Kibale Forest in nearby Uganda specifically in response to the notion that the intergroup conflict Goodall’s team had witnessed might have been due to the distorting effects of those banana boxes. Ghiglieri writes, “My mission … [was] to find out whether these warlike killings were normal or an artifact of the researchers having provisioned the chimps with food to observe them.”19 But somehow Margaret Power’s name doesn’t even appear in the index of Ghiglieri’s book, published eight years after hers.
We lack the space to adequately explore the questions Power raised, or to address subsequent reports of intergroup conflict among some (but not all) unprovisioned chimps in other study areas.20 While we’ve got our doubts about the motivations of Pinker and Chagnon (see below), like Margaret Power, we have none about Jane Goodall’s intentions or scientific integrity. Still, with all due respect to Goodall, Power’s questions deserve consideration by anyone seriously interested in the debate over the possible primate origins of warfare.