Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Sometimes it sucks
so bad, that it burns. The good news that things change, they transform, and so
life becomes something new. Only death is eternal, and no, I’m not talking
about G.W. and his shooting rampage – yesterday or so, (May 1, 2020), Mr. Trudeau
the PM banned 1500 types of assault rifles, or 1500 assault rifles period, or
whatever. That is understandable – he had a rough time lately, first his wife
got sick, then his mother, and now G.W.’s rampage… and on top of it, during
NATO’s practice in the Mediterranean, a Canadian helicopter crashed, everyone
on board of it is dead, and some of the people are from Nova Scotia again…
yeah. April was not a good month for this Canadian province. What else?
I have watched the ‘Gorilla vs. Leopard’ episode of AFO, and
I have watched the chimpanzee episode of David Attenborough’s ‘Dynasties’. I am
struck how Africa’s great apes are very much like us, if we were polygamous,
that is. Pause.
Here is the thing. When it comes to sex and families, the
animal kingdom is varied and various and deserves a separate discussion of its
own, but among the mammals? You usually have the females raising the young
alone, or you got a main mated couple and their offspring, (and sometimes
younger siblings), instead. There are various versions of those scenarios, but
the basic designs are those two – the lemurs have a female in charge, (usually
the main mother), while the monkeys like the marmosets and the night monkeys
are monogamous – and then we come to primates such as the howler monkeys, that
actually have harems led by males. Pause.
Let us get down to terms: ‘matriarchy’ – females are in
charge. ‘Patriarchy’ – the males are. ‘Matrilineage’ – families are designed following
the maternal bloodlines. ‘Patrilineage’ – same as before, but following the
paternal. Among many mammals, males tend to come and go, (whether we’re talking
about deer, lions, or even baboons), while the females stay, raise the young,
and shape the family’s culture, (in a manner of speaking).
…And then we got the gorillas and the chimpanzees, where the
males are very much in charge, especially among the more peaceful gorillas, and
act not unlike the more polygamous human cultures. Yes, female chimpanzees can
stand up for themselves, and among the ‘other’ chimpanzee species, the bonobo,
the society is largely matriarchal…and much more peaceful than the society of
the common chimpanzee, more like the gorillas’… pause.
A semi-popular theory states that the chimpanzee and bonobo
lineages split when the gorillas, (there are several species of them,
actually), appeared on the scene. They are more herbivorous than the common
chimpanzees were, and scientists believe that when the ancestral gorillas
encountered the ancestral chimpanzees, they forced the latter to become the
more omnivorous common chimpanzees, and in places where they were absent, the
ancestral apes become bonobos instead. The latter are more closely related to
the common chimpanzees than to the gorillas, but they behave more as the
gorillas do instead. Evolution sometimes acts in strange ways.
…The orangutans, it can be noted, have evolved in apparent
isolation from the other types of great apes; the gibbons, or the lesser apes,
also live in the jungles of Southeast Asia, but the two groups of primates tend
to avoid each other period. Orangutans live where the gibbons typically do not,
and vice versa. In Africa, the gorillas and chimpanzees avoid each other, but
because they live on the ground rather than on trees, they aren’t as shy as the
orangutans and the gibbons are, (proportionally speaking); the common chimpanzee,
in particular, may be the most violent of the all great apes, as well as the
second smallest, after its’ bonobo cousin. The bonobo, it should be noted, is a
very peaceful mammal, and nowhere as violent as the common chimpanzee is…
…Well, this is all that I wanted to say for now. See you all
soon!
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