SUB-HUMAN CULTURE BEGINNINGS 



337 



the eyes of the world successful invention 

 is successful economic exploitation. And 

 however we may rebel ethically or aes- 

 thetically, this verdict has primary cul- 

 ture historical validity. It is when a 

 machine makes money that it comes into 

 cultural use and consciousness. At the 

 same time, a scientific interpretation of 

 culture must penetrate deeper and recog- 

 nize the antecedent stages and gradualness 

 of development; much as for reckoning 

 our ages we count from the day of birth, 

 but the biologist in studying life history 

 goes back of that act of emergence into 

 pre-natal life, to conception, and beyond 

 that to the ancestral germplasm. 



It is the innumerable minimal unit ele- 

 ments of human invention that find their 

 rudimentary prototypes among the anthro- 

 poids in their qualities of discreteness 

 and synthesis. Beyond that, the parallel 

 does not go; for the interrelation and 

 accumulation of these elements is a cul- 

 tural process, and culture the apes as yet 

 give no indication of possessing. 



THE DESTRUCTIVE IMPULSE 



Left to themselves, chimpanzees are 

 destructive. They love to demolish. 

 Like small children who have grown up 

 uncontrolled, they derive immediate sat- 

 isfaction from prying, ripping, biting, 

 and deliberately smashing. Once they 

 begin, they rarely desist until an object 

 has been reduced to its components. 

 They never learn to lace shoes; they find 

 spontaneous pleasure in unlacing them. 

 The impulse to construct is infinitely 

 weaker; it is called into activity only by 

 special problems, and the solution of these 

 is trying. One of the few exceptions is 

 nest building. This the chimpanzee does 

 from an early age, and apparently without 

 being taught. Here we seem to have a 

 genuine case of what in the older terminol- 

 ogy was called "specific instinct." Nest 



building is of interest because directed 

 toward an objective outside the body. 

 But, according to both Koehler and 

 Yerkes, the building is partly a drawing 

 and tucking of branches under the body. 

 Some of the twigs snap off and tend to 

 hold in place the branches which remain 

 attached to the tree. In this way a 

 tolerable mat or platform is built up. 

 This however remains, during the act of 

 building, in contact with the ape's body; 

 it is built against his skin, he feels it dur- 

 ing the process of construction, and the 

 sensations aroused may be an important 

 element in the carrying out of the process. 

 Some chimpanzees, if trees were not avail- 

 able or loose material did not suffice, laid 

 down a ring that outlined the body and 

 merely suggested the nest— a nest gesture, 

 as it were. 



The powerful impulses of chimpanzees 

 toward destructiveness may help to ex- 

 plain one phenomenon in the history of 

 human culture already touched upon: the 

 long precedence in time of the chipping 

 over the grinding technique in stone. 

 After all, the earlier and grosser process 

 of production by fracture is one of break- 

 ing apart. Grinding, being so slow as to 

 be almost imperceptible in its results, 

 must be quite unsatisfactory as a means of 

 satisfying the demolition impulse. As an 

 object is slowly rubbed into form, there 

 is probably rather a sense of shaping and 

 constructing. Of course, the Chellean 

 picks and other early Paleolithic artifacts 

 are not mere by-products of an interest in 

 cracking boulders; they are too definitely 

 adaptive, too patternized, too utilizable 

 as tools. But preceding the Palaeolithic 

 there are the "eoliths" which have been 

 championed by some and denied by others 

 as the earliest tools. They date back to 

 the Pliocene, if not the Miocene, much 

 beyond the earliest fossils of organisms in 

 the line of human descent. It is gener- 





