Читать книгу Anthropology For Dummies - Cameron M. Smith - Страница 94

Primate social behavior isn’t always sweetness and light. Like many animals, primates often threaten one another, but coming to actual physical blows is rare; it’s just too risky. A better tactic is to bluff, and plenty of that goes on: Chimpanzees scream, throw sticks, slap the ground, and bare their teeth, all in an effort to intimidate — and it works. Over the eons, intense competition among primates has favored those with large, intimidating canines; the baboons’ teeth can be knife-like and particularly scary. Among humans, most threats and displays of prowess are accomplished verbally or with objects that show our rank, and so the pressure for especially big canines has lifted. This pattern seems to go back at least 2 million years, where fossil evidence indicates that our early ancestors’ canines aren’t as large as they are in most primate species.