for foraging but also for hunting. Those human ancestors who could walk upright also used less energy during travel and freed up their hands to carry food, thereby nourishing themselves even when they couldn’t forage successfully. They could also move between distant patches of forest more readily, and, as a result, provision more offspring.
In Catching Fire, Richard Wrangham offers an analogy to evoke the close bond that humans share with these early hominids. He gives the example of an australopithecine, an ancestor of modern humans that lived three million years ago, approximately halfway along the evolutionary path from our last common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos:
Imagine going to a sporting event with sixty thousand seats around the stadium. You arrive early with your grandmother, and the two of you take the first seats. Next to your grandmother sits her grandmother, your great-great-grandmother. Next to her is your great-great-great-great-grandmother. The stadium fills with the ghosts of preceding grandmothers. An hour later the seat next to you is occupied by the last to sit down, the ancestor of you all. She nudges your elbow, and you turn to find a strange nonhuman face.
As for all of the grandmothers going back to the last common ancestor of humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos, it is conceivable that they could be housed in the United States’s largest stadium, that of the University of Michigan, which hosted a record 114,804 attendees in 2011. In Richard Dawkins’s essay, “Gaps in the Mind,” he describes a similar thought experiment and writes that, in the lineage leading back to the last common ancestor, “you would nowhere find any sharp discontinuity. Daughters would resemble mothers just as much (or as little) as they always do.”
Recent research suggests that there were numerous species of early humans, often overlapping or being rendered extinct as they spread out. Homo sapiens—modern humans—originated in Africa sometime before two hundred thousand years ago, then moved into Europe, killing off or absorbing the Neanderthals, adept dwellers of cold climates whose cranial cavity, despite our image of them as brutes, was in fact larger than our own. The Neanderthals left a significant trace of their DNA in humans living outside Africa (about 2.6 percent in mine, according to a genetic test), but Homo sapiens endemic to the Congo have no trace of Homo neanderthalensis in their genes. Nor do they, the Europeans, or Asians, have the genes of Denisovans, hominids living in Siberia forty to sixty thousand years ago, though the Melanesian and Australian aborigines share about 3 percent of their DNA with them. Numerous tribes of early human species likely dotted the earth, interbreeding and gradually forming our own species as we now know it.
Unlike in other parts of Africa, where volcanic activity has preserved traces of ancient peoples, the Congo rainforest leaves few fossils. Though migrations have crisscrossed the region, the soil of the forest is high in acidity, dissolving bones. What we know of human history here is limited. Before the arrival of the current racial majority, the Bantu, the likely inhabitants were pygmies, people thought to have evolved smaller because of forest conditions. Modern-day pygmies use non-Bantu words for many aspects of the forest and its plants, but speak languages derived from their contact with the Bantu, who spread from Cameroon and eastern Nigeria three thousand years ago. Empowered by Iron Age technology, the Bantu moved out in successive waves over centuries, in one of the largest expansions in human history.
Today, there are over seven billion humans, and no other mammal species can claim our rate of successful adaption. As Dale Peterson writes in Eating Apes, a book that describes some of the failures of major conservation NGOs and the degree to which logging and the commercial bushmeat trade are decimating great ape populations, “we are growing rapidly enough to displace, body for body, the entire world population of chimpanzees every day; rapidly enough to displace, body for body, the entire world population of gorillas every twelve hours; and rapidly enough to displace, body for body, the entire world population of bonobos every six hours at least.” The destruction of other creatures’ habitats has allowed this, though increasingly we are looking for other ways of living, our self-awareness being the trait that can most help us as our climate again changes and we question the future of our resources. In the process of trying to understand ourselves, we have become fascinated with our origins. But if we want to reconstruct the path of human evolution, the best way for us to understand what is lost or left only as rare, incomplete fossils is to consider the great apes, our closest cousins who are hunted to the verge of extinction. Though the reduction of great ape habitats likely began thousands of years ago as a result of human expansion, farming, and hunting, various factors have caused it to speed up exponentially. Booming human populations fuel the demand for timber and bushmeat, and modern weapons and motorized transportation facilitate their extraction. Even though laws forbid great ape hunting throughout Africa, they are rarely enforced, and few people know about them. Furthermore, as a result of both the local and global demand for palm oil, which is found in many Western household products, plantations are being created across Africa, resulting in massive habitat destruction. Lastly, the international race for mineral resources has funded the recent wars here, displacing communities, destroying the infrastructure, and forcing millions of people to rely on bushmeat to survive.
I was only beginning to grasp how the rainforest had shaped these people. It was a world of close horizons, walls of trees blocking my sight, the earth itself suddenly rising or falling, so that paths had to wind constantly around obstacles. Ever since I was a child, I’d thought in landscapes. I loved photographs of mountains, deserts, or plains, rolling hills or savannah, and only after staring at them for some time did I feel that I was ready to learn about their inhabitants, that I might understand them. But this terrain was unlike any I had known, and since our landing the day before, it seemed to me that the rainforest had absorbed the past, dissolved it like ancestral bones, and it would take time for me to begin to comprehend the culture here in deeper ways.
More and more cocks crowed, and when I opened my eyes, the light was stronger, brightly outlining the wooden window shutter and the bedroom door’s uneven planks. There was the swishing sound of someone sweeping the dirt around the building. I got up and opened the uneven square of wood that fit into the empty window.
Willy, the keeper of the Vie Sauvage headquarters, a tall young man with high cheekbones, swept, moving the broom in controlled, rapid motions as sunlight spilled across the town, lighting up earthen buildings and palm thatch in incandescent shades of orange and yellow. He held one arm behind his back as he worked, bent at the waist, taking short steps, sweeping the dirt of the yard into a pattern of symmetric brushstrokes like those in a Japanese stone garden.
In the main room of the headquarters, I found Sally already deep in conversation with local leaders. She had told me about the delicate and time-consuming way in which social relationships were built. All morning, as I prepared my bags and the cooks readied breakfast, people constantly arrived to speak with her. They said they’d come to thank her and Michael for all that they’d done, before sitting down and explaining their needs: the lack of funds to educate their children, the suffering of a sick relative, the cost of medicine. Then they stayed, so that every task and discussion was slowed by the presence of people sitting in the plastic chairs, on the wooden benches, squatting in the shade of the overhang, leaning against the Land Cruiser’s fenders.
Willy and Marie-Claire, head cook, hospital nurse, and the wife of Cosmas Bofangi Batuafe, a local conservationist also supported by BCI, tried to convince Sally to stay another night. They became visibly downcast when she explained that BCI had work in Kokolopori.
“If we stay another night,” Sally told me, “then they get paid for cooking and taking care of the guesthouse. But we need to get to the reserve.”
Behind her, the hood of the Land Cruiser was up, held in place by a stick polished yellow from use, five men looking closely at the engine. One wheel was off, and a young man was cutting squares from old rubber tubing with a handsaw to patch leaks in the tire’s inner tube. Marie-Claire, whose round face had quickly regained its smile, began reciting prices, speaking Lingala though the numbers were in French, as was the word franc.
“No,
