Word: apes
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True enough, but I could be forgiven for expecting more. Bonobos are an endangered African ape found only in the Democratic Republic of Congo (D.R.C.), the vast, sweltering river basin that is Africa's answer to the Amazon. Though they look like chimpanzees, they are a distinct species. They are slightly smaller, for one thing, the better to handle a life spent predominantly in trees. But it is the bonobos' social behavior that fascinates humans. While gorillas beat their chests and chimpanzees fight savage wars, bonobos appear to be largely animals of peace. They live communally, enjoy gender equality...
...forest, a group of 21 bonobos, oblivious to the political silliness an ocean away, oblige the liberals by showing us their gentler side. A baby kisses its mother. A group of females shoo an unpopular male away with matriarchal authority. A bonobo couple, apparently enjoying a kind of ape honeymoon, share figs, nuts and shoots and hang out in the trees with moonfaced expressions before copulating twice high up in the canopy...
...holding above his head one of the 400 firearms he owned - a handmade Brooks flintlock rifle - and proclaiming that the Democratic Presidential candidate could remove that gun only by prying it "from my cold, dead hands." It was as if Al Gore was Messala, or the Ape King, or the Omega man's marauders, or a band of Comanches who needed a comeuppance of defiant rhetoric plus massive weaponry. The declaration assured that popular history would now remember Heston not just as a movie axiom but as the Holy Gun Fighter...
MOSES IN DYSTOPIA And when he wasn't at home in the past, he was a voyager into the future. For a while in the late 60s and early 70s, Heston owned the upscale science fiction genre. As the stranded astronaut on the Planet of the Apes, he was the ultimate loner: the only member of his species in a world ruled by monkeys. Heston had caught a cold on the shoot, but director Franklin Schaffner insisted they keep filming, because the new gruffness in the star's voice lent a desperate urgency to his lines, from his first words...
Charles Darwin started wrestling with questions like this when he published his 1871 book The Descent of Man. Darwin granted that his readers might doubt that humans evolved from an ancestral ape. "Man differs so greatly in his mental power from all other animals, there must be some error in this conclusion," he wrote. But he argued that the difference between us and other animals was of degree, not of kind. That applied not just to our teeth and toes but also to our morals and minds. And even, he declared, to love...