Blaming Our Inner Ape

Humans love to pin retrograde gender dynamics on our primate cousins. Is that fair?

- By Rebecca Giggs

One morning in January 1961, following a breakfast of baby cereal, condensed milk, and half an egg, a male chimpanzee from Cameroon known to his handlers as Ham was strapped into a pressure-controlled capsule, loaded aboard a NASA rocket, and shot into space. No human had yet been where he was headed. At the time of Ham's foray to the stars, physicians still feared that crucial bodily functions (including swallowing and cardiac activity) might not weather the weightlessness of astronautic flight. When Ham returned to Earth's surface with only a bruised nose to show for the adventure, he entered history as the first hominoid to endure outer space.

Chimpanzees—along with their cousins the bonobos—are our closest living relatives. Little wonder we are prone to view them as human prototypes. At least 96 percent of our DNA is shared, and we have cal traits in common, including some of the blood groups and skeletal features such as delicate sinuses. Using a chimpanzee to aid in “human rating” a NASA space vehicle for astronauts was a test of our mutual fragility. It was also a symbolic gesture, marking space travel as the culmination of our evolutionary trajectory into social beings and tool-users sophisticated enough to leave Earth. One way to understand the moment when Ham was Alung into that inhuman realm where the universe skims the planet would be to say that we were, as a species, looking to our ancestral past to forge the frontiers of our future.