Читать книгу Anthropology For Dummies - Cameron M. Smith - Страница 96

One reason people may feel ambivalent about the fate of chimpanzees — and, by extension, other endangered primates — is that for a long time Western civilization has looked on the chimpanzee with suspicion, hatred, fear, and disgust. Medieval sculptures depict chimpanzees as gargoyle-like winged devils; in the Victorian era, captive chimpanzees disgusted many Londoners, who believed that the chimpanzee was a species locked in time, a throwback to a disgusting, primordial past. Of course, the Victorians were wrong: Chimpanzees are here in the present and have evolved for as long as we have. That they didn’t evolve the kinds of language and culture of modern humans is neither here nor there; each species adapts in its own way, and cross-species comparisons of this kind are pointless. Today, despite knowing that most of our DNA is identical to that of the chimpanzee, chimps are still dressed up for commercials and movies and essentially looked on as comical quasi-humans. But some scientists feel that, due to chimpanzees’ genetic and anatomical similarities to humanity, the chimpanzee genus — Pan — should be dissolved, and chimpanzees brought into our genus, Homo.