I Heart Gorillas

[poliphilo]

There was a picture in the paper yesterday of a wild Gorilla wading through a stream. And the big news is that she was using a walking stick.

As the author of the accompanying article, Desmond Morris, said, what we are seeing here is the beginnings of "gorilla technology".

Does this mean that if gorillas are left alone (which they won't be) they will eventually (after several million years) get round to inventing the wheel, the toasting fork and the electric door chime?

Yes. Probably.

Gorillas are peaceable creatures. Vegetarian too. Just imagine the civilisation they might have created if they'd got to the walking stick before us.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but the gorillas got close to doing it. We only pipped them to the post by a few million years, and what's that in terms of evolutionary history?

A civilisation created by octopoi would be- erm- wet.

[mokie]

I bet octopodian civilization would have the most complicated TV remotes ever...

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

Maybe we too were perfectly peaceful before we started using walking sticks?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That is a possibility....

I guess we need to stick around and see whether the gorillas ever start hitting one another with their walking sticks.

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

They'll probably be extinct before they get as far as that...

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Isn't it gorillas who also carry toolkits with them when they go off to invade termite mounds? They take along a big stick to punch holes in the mound and a smaller stick to extricate the termites.

We've made such a mess. If we'd never learned to smeldt, maybe we, too, could live uncluttered lives with only an assortment of sticks.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure. I thought that was Bonobos, but I could be wrong.

But if we'd never learned metal-working there'd be no space ships and no Jean Luc Picard.

[manfalling.livejournal.com]

damn fine point, succinctly made...

[arielstarshadow.livejournal.com]

Chimps will do that - put the stick down into the insect mounds (I think they do it with ants, too), and then lick the insects off of the stick when they pull it out.

[arielstarshadow.livejournal.com]

Of course, the irritating part is that they immediately assume that because they've never seen it before, it's a "new" behavior, when it could be just as likely that gorillas have been doing this for years and it's just the fact that no one has managed to catch them at it yet.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Well, yes.

And we've only been observing these gorillas for an incredibly short time. I don't believe they were known to science until the 1920s.

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

I remember when I was a kid there was a scary comicbook about the Green Gorilla. I'm not exactly sure, but I seem to remember him coming out of the green swamp. I spent years hiding under my covers every time I heard a strange noise because there was a swamp a few miles away...and of course there was GREEN matter on top of the water.

Wait a minute!

[jubal51394.livejournal.com]

"Just imagine the civilisation they might have created if they'd got to the walking stick before us."

How do we know for sure that they didn't?

Maybe they foresaw all of this horrid potential future and just said, "No thanks."

Re: Wait a minute!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Not only ingenious but possessed of the gift of prophecy- well why not?

[balirus.livejournal.com]

Call me pessimistic but sooner or later they would look like this:



Starts with a stick and then a sword, damned dirty apes!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Handsome set of dudes.....