My Monkey Baby

In "Not A Chimp" I deal very strongly with the phenomenon of anthropomorphism - our ability to identify with and attribute human mental abilities to our pets and other animals. It has led to over 200 chimpanzees being kept in homes as pets in the USA, together with thousands of monkeys of a variety of species. Keeping chimps in your home is potentially perilous - as my opening chapter describes - when the cuddly chimp abandons its sociable behaviour to reveal itself as a dangerous wild animal. The anthropomorphism projected onto primate pets can often reach bizarre levels as a documentary titled My Monkey Baby on the UK's Channel 4 amply demonstrated on Tuesday night last. Here two American couples and a single woman were shown keeping monkeys as baby substitutes. Diapers, frilly dresses, junk food, sharing a bed - you name it, they did it. Lori and Jim kept a capuchin monkey as a daughter named Jessica Marie. As Jim said, "If I hear someone call her a monkey, I throw a fit. She is my daughter, 100%". 'Nuff said..... If you want to watch this treacly film about profound delusion click on the Channel 4 link above.

How We Ate Ourselves To Being Human

Richard Wrangham's new book, "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human" is published today by Basic Books. It was Wrangham who inspired me to write the penultimate chapter of NOT CHIMP - titled "The Ape That Domesticated Itself". Although the archaeological evidence for hearths and cooking only goes back some 800,000 years, Wrangham pulls together all we do know about the more gracile skeletons, brain size and gut size of Homo erectus to posit that cooking made calories more available from foods - specially tubers and meat - allowing guts to shrink, brains to expand, and teeth to get less massive. The advent of fires, cooking and larders would also, he argues, have led to radial social changes including long term stable relationships between men and women where women benefited from the protection of their food cache that men could afford, and men were freed up somewhat for socializing and other pursuits.