The point of the experiment was not that apes used stone tools, but that the ability to make stone tools was literally within their grasp. Wright's experiment was one more reason to think that human beings were not as unique as they had previously imagined themselves to be.
"But why would Amy say they weren't gorillas?"
"Because they're not," Elliot said. "These animals don't look like gorillas and they don't act like gorillas. They are physically and behaviorally different." He went on to voice his suspicion that not only had these animals been trained, they had been bred - perhaps interbred with chimpanzees or, more strangely still, with men.
They thought he was joking. But the facts were disturbing. In 1960, the first blood protein studies quantified the kinship between man and ape. Biochemically man's nearest relative was the chimpanzee, much closer than the gorilla. In 1964, chimpanzee kidneys were successfully transplanted into men; blood transfusions were also possible.
But the degree of similarity was not fully known until 1975, when biochemists compared the DNA of chimps and men. It was discovered that chimps differed from men by only 1 percent of their DNA strands. And almost no one wanted to acknowledge one consequence: with modern DNA hybridization techniques and embryonic implantation, ape-ape crosses were certain, and man-ape crosses were possible.
Of course, the fourteenth-century inhabitants of Zinj had no way to mate DNA strands. But Elliot pointed out that they had consistently underestimated the skills of the Zinj people, who at the very least had managed, five hundred years ago, to carry out sophisticated animal-training procedures only duplicated by Western scientists within the last ten years.
And as Elliot saw it, the animals the Zinjians had trained presented an awesome problem.
"We have to face the realities," he said. "When Amy was given a human IQ test, she scored ninety-two. For all practical purposes, Amy is as smart as a human being, and in many ways she is smarter - more perceptive and sensitive. She can manipulate us at least as skillfully as we can manipulate her.
"These gray gorillas possess that same intelligence, yet they have been single-mindedly bred to be the primate equivalent of Doberman pinschers - guard animals, attack animals, trained for cunning and viciousness. But they are much brighter and more resourceful than dogs. And they will continue their attacks until they succeed in killing us all, as they have killed everyone who has come here before."
3.Looking Through the Bars
IN 1975, THE MATHEMATICIAN S. L. BERENSKY reviewed the literature on primate language and reached a startling conclusion. "There is no doubt," he announced, "that primates are far superior in intelligence to man."
In Berensky's mind, "The salient question - which every human visitor to the zoo intuitively asks - is, who is behind the bars? Who is caged, and who is free?. . . On both sides of the bars primates can be observed making faces at each other. It is too facile to say that man is superior because he has made the zoo. We impose our special horror of barred captivity - a form of punishment among our species - and assume that other primates feel as we do."
Berensky likened primates to foreign ambassadors. "Apes have for centuries managed to get along with human beings, as ambassadors from their species. In recent years, they have even learned to communicate with human beings using sign language. But it is a one-sided diplomatic exchange; no human being has attempted to live in ape society, to master their language and customs, to eat their food, to live as they do. The apes have learned to talk to us, but we have never learned to talk to them. Who, then, should be judged the greater intellect?"
Berensky added a prediction. "The time will come," he
said, "when circumstances may force some human beings to communicate with a primate society on its own terms. Only then human beings will become aware of their complacent egotism with regard to other animals."
The ERTS expedition, isolated deep in the Congo rain forest, now faced just such a problem. Confronted by a new species of gorilla-like animal, they somehow had to deal with it on its own terms.
During the evening, Elliot transmitted the taped breath sounds to Houston, and from there they were relayed to San Francisco. The transcript which followed the transmission was brief:
Seamans Wrote: RECVD TRNSMISN. SHLD HELP.
IMPORTNT-NEED TRNSLATION SOON, Elliot typed back. WHN HAVE?
COMPUTR ANALYSS DIFICLT - PROBLMS XCEED MGNITUDE CSL / JSL TRNSLATN.
"What does that mean?" Ross said.
"He's saying that the translation problems exceed the problem of translating Chinese or Japanese sign language."
She hadn't known there was a Chinese or Japanese sign language, but Elliot explained that there were sign languages for all major languages, and each followed its own rules. For instance, BSL, British sign language, was totally different from ASL, American sign language, even though spoken and written English language was virtually identical in the two countries.
Different sign languages had different grammar and syntax, and even obeyed different sign traditions. Chinese sign language used the middle finger pointing outward for several signs, such as TWO WEEKS FROM NOW and BROTHER, although this configuration was insulting and unacceptable in American sign language.
"But this is a spoken language," Ross said.
"Yes," Elliot said, "but it's a complicated problem. We aren't likely to get it translated soon."
By nightfall, they had two additional pieces of information. Ross ran a computer simulation through Houston which came back with a probability course of three days and a standard deviation of two days to find the diamond mines. That meant they should be prepared for five more days at the site. Food was not a problem, but ammunition was: Munro proposed to use tear gas.