DOMINIC W. MASSARO, editor
University of California, Santa Cruz

Mother, Son, and Ape

Infant Chimpanzee and Human Child
By Nadezhena Nikolaevna Ladygina-Kohts, edited by Frans B. M. de Waal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. xv+ 451 pp. Cloth, $65.

The chimpanzee is our nearest nonhuman relative. The most recent common ancestor dates from some 6 or 7 million years ago, and in molecular terms we are closer to the chimpanzee than chimpanzees are to gorillas. We share with the chimpanzee some 99% of our DNA. Yet psychologists have taken curiously little interest in this engaging but increasingly endangered species, preferring to glean the laws of behavior from rats, pigeons, or, when times were tougher, earthworms. When behaviorism succumbed to the cognitive revolution in the 1960s, chimpanzees were still deemed of little interest, largely because the cognitive revolution was founded in part on the belief that the human mind was fundamentally different from that of any other species. Even the new breed of evolutionary psychologists have argued that the human mind was shaped during the Pleistocene, some 4 or 5 million years after we parted company from the line that led to the modern chimpanzee and bonobo. The chimps simply never made it.