Hannah Holmes, The Well-dressed Ape: A Natural History of Myself, Scribe Publications, 2009, RRP $35.00. ISBN 9781921372520
With our high-brow ideas (courtesy of those 'huge, hot' brains of ours), formidable motor skills (thanks to those dexterous digits) and professional indifference, we humans have long enjoyed our place at the head of the animal kingdom's table.
Now, in The Well-dressed Ape, US science journalist Hannah Holmes turns a cool, scientific eye back on us, reminding Homo Sapiens of our mammalian origins and, in the process, bringing us down to size or, more to the point, down to the rudiments of our species.
Offering herself up as 'an average enough specimen', Holmes casts a critical eye over the body she's long taken for granted (bar the bits and bobs she's all too aware of). She concludes that before her stands an upright creature disarmingly vulnerable in its 'knobby', pink-skinned nakedness. Odd-looking, one might say ludicrously top heavy. Yet it's this very peculiarity that's also the key to our success.
'The combination of a light body and heavy brain undeniably works,' writes Holmes. 'My species is prospering. And if we look a little funny while we're doing it, we can change that, too.'
When it comes to us humans it's all in the mind, she concludes: 'The brain has evolved to dominate the animal. The organ consumes a large percentage of the body's energy budget. In exchange, the brain makes possible the human's tremendous tool kit, which at this time ranges from stone axes to melon ballers and a space station.'
Size definitely adds 'voltage' to muscles, organs and nerves, but the human brain 'floats above that scale' and is strongly influenced by sex hormones as it develops in the foetus.
We're a smart lot alright, even if our behaviour is, at times, highly questionable. Not only do we mark our territory 'with doors, fences and plastic flamingos', our appetites are governed as much by emotion as by hunger or need, our communication is powerful and flexible as well as manipulative, and while we're sexually proactive it's often without a thought for reproduction.
But here's the rub: Whales, dolphins and elephants all beat us in the cranium stakes, and linguistically our chatter seems no more or less intelligent than, say, a prairie dog's or European starling's. And these are only two we know of. Ouch.
The one thing that truly separates humans from