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Going the whole orang: Darwin, Wallace and the natural history
of orangutans
John van Wyhe
a
,
1
, Peter C. Kjærgaard
b
,
c
,
*
a
Department of Biological Sciences & Fellow of Tembusu College, National University of Singapore, 14 Science Drive 4, Singapore 117543, Singapore
b
Centre for Biocultural History, Aarhus University, Jens Chr. Skous Vej 7, 8000 Aarhus, Denmark
c
The Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen, Øster Voldgade 5-7, 1350 Copenhagen K, Denmark
article info
Article history:
Available online 7 April 2015
Keywords:
Orangutans
Great apes
Human evolution
Charles Darwin
Alfred Russel Wallace
Anthropology
abstract
This article surveys the European discovery and early ideas about orangutans followed by the contrasting
experiences with these animals of the co-founders of evolution by natural selection, Charles Darwin and
Alfred Russel Wallace. The first non-human greatape that both of them interacted with was the orangutan.
They were both profoundly influenced by what they saw, but the contexts of their observations could
hardly be more different. Darwin met orangutans in the Zoological Gardens in London while Wallace saw
them in the wild in Borneo. In different ways these observations helped shape their views of human
evolution and humanity’s place in nature. Their findings played a major role in shaping some of the key
questions that were pursued in human evolutionary studies during the rest of the nineteenth century.
Ó2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND
license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
When citing this paper, please use the full journal title Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
1. Going the whole orang
In the nineteenth century contrasts and similarities in human
cultures and physical appearances were habitually brought for-
ward in the growing British anthropological and ethnographic
literature supporting either a common or a separate origin of
peoples around the world. They looked and behaved differently.
The question was why? What had shaped human diversityand was
there anything bridging the differences? Was it variation or sepa-
ration? Looking for answers scholars systematically began histor-
icizing humans in a naturalistic context. Consequently, a key
challenge was to identify the link connecting the cultural and
natural history of humans. Evolutionary theories eventually pro-
vided an acceptable framework for bringing things together. But
already in the late eighteenth century scholars were looking for
clues making the connection. In this context, primatesdand in
particular the great apesdplayed a central role. There were many
questions as it was not clear who they were and how the rela-
tionship to humans should be interpreted.
Charles Darwin (1809e1882) and Alfred Russel Wallace (1823e
1913) shared this interest. Despite the different parts of the world to
which they travelled, the first living (non-human) great apes seen
and studied by both Darwin and Wallace were orangutans. Darwin
saw his orangutans in 1838 in the Zoological Gardens in London’s
Regent’s Park. Wallace saw his in the jungles of west Borneo in
1855. But it was not just the vastly different contexts in which they
observed their orangutans that distinguished what Darwin and
Wallace took from their experiences with the orangutan.
Orangutans come only from the islands of Sumatra and Borneo
in Southeast Asia. These are now recognised as two separate sub-
species (Pongo abelii and Pongo pygmaeus) and our closest living
relatives after chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), bonobos (Pan pan-
iscus) and gorillas (Gorilla beringei and Gorilla gorilla).
2
*Corresponding author. Centre for Biocultural History, Aarhus University, Jens
Chr. Skous Vej 7, 8000 Aarhus, Denmark.
E-mail addresses: dbsjmvw@nus.edu.sg (J. van Wyhe), kjaergaard@snm.ku.dk
(P.C. Kjærgaard).
1
Tel.: þ65 66011163.
2
See Locke et al. (2011), Prado-Martinez et al. (2013) and Tuttle (2014),pp.
42e45.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and
Biomedical Sciences
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsc
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.02.006
1369-8486/Ó2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 51 (2015) 53e63
The geologist Charles Lyell (1797e1875) wrote in 1859 that
accepting evolution fully was to “go the whole orang.”
3
This was a
play on the expression to ‘go the whole hog.’For Lyell going “the
whole orang”with evolutionary thinking meant, most painfully of
all, linking humans to animal ancestors.
4
It meant that humans
were not creations separate from the restof the animal kingdom. To
go the whole orang then, meant not just to treat humans scientif-
ically but to go all the way to making them animals like all the rest.
But why should it have been the whole orang? Why not go the
whole baboon or the whole chimp? In order to understand that we
need to take a closer look at the European history of primates and
the deep cultural influence of apes and monkeys on the question of
what makes us human. Appreciating how the innate connection
between humans and primates builds on themes introduced
through centuries of entangled cultural and natural history is
crucial to identifying central themes of the human-animal bound-
ary in nineteenth-century attempts to historicise humans. How
special humans were, remained a question that was continuously
negotiated by comparing humans and apes. Historically orangutans
had become the generic term for African and Asian great apes. It
was thus culturally highly significant when Darwin and Wallace
each met a proper orangutan.
2. The gradual discovery of orangutans
Macaques and baboons, living in the relative vicinity of the
Mediterranean and known since antiquity, served as a reflection of
mundane bodily functions and desires, and a contrast to philo-
sophical and religious ideals of humanity. Plato (c. 428e348 BCE),
Aristotle (384e322 BCE), Pliny the Elder (23e79) and Galen (130e
200) discussed monkeys and compared them to humans. In me-
dieval Christian contexts monkeys were seen as degenerate, foolish
and obscene, representatives of frivolity and the grotesque. By the
end of the middle ages the simian sinner turned into the simian fool
as prototype of all-too-human qualities, mostly savage and impul-
sive, but also sometimes as an idyllic wild man of the woods.
5
All of these images and connotations continued in the discus-
sion of great apes. Chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans were
gradually discovered by Europeans in the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries following trade and European colonial expansion
in Africa and Southeast Asia. Travellers’accounts and specimens of
great apes, often in poor condition, put on display at markets and
animal gardens, or kept in the menageries of the wealthy com-
plemented the enduring European tradition of mirroring human
life in monkeys.
Almost all great apes which reached Europe alive in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were juveniles that died
young. The increasing scientific interest and resulting anatomical
studies also meant the gradual disappearance of the many tradi-
tional representations of ape-like creatures originating in classical
and medieval texts. Faced with real ape bodies it was easier to
detect fiction and fancy in the many sources purportedly reporting
meetings with, physical appearances and characters of wild men
of the woods. However, they were difficult to distinguish and
consistently grouped together under the generic name orangutan.
The Dutch physician Jacobus Bontius (1592e1631) working in
Java in the early seventeenth century reported that the local name
for the wild apes on the island was “Ourang Outang”or ‘man of the
forest’. He depicted one as a well-endowed furry female with a
mane a bit like a lion. The exaggerated female attributes did not
pass unnoticed by later commentators, nor did another human
feature, the ability to talk. However, Bontius remarked, the orang-
utans had their own very special reason to remain silent: “the Ja-
vanese claimed that the Ourang-Outangs could talk, but that they
did not want to because they did not want be forced to work”.
6
The
open acknowledgement of the almost human character of the
orangutan was not Bontius’only legacy. His report of the Javanese
name for the great apes was picked up by his countryman Nicolaes
Tulp (1593e1674), a seventeenth-century physician and professor
of anatomy and surgery in Amsterdam. Tulp was the first to apply
the name orangutan to an ape in Europe, although his was not an
orangutan, but a chimpanzee or bonobo from Angola brought tothe
Netherlands by Dutch traders. His widely read essay “Homo syl-
vestris; Orang-Outang”(1641 ) was based on observations of a
young female ape held in the menagerie of the Prince of Orange in
The Hague.
Following Tulp, later writers used orangutan for any large
human-like ape from Africa or Southeast Asia. Homo sylvestris,‘man
of the forest’, was likewise used synonymously. With an origin in
medieval folklore it originally referred to hairy, wild and dangerous
creatures, half human, half beast, believed to live deep in European
forests. Some of these characteristics were also transferred as the
name was applied to the great apes of Africa and Southeast Asia.
Thus the first studies of great apes in Europe were a complex
mixture of empirical observations entwined with traditional reli-
gious and metaphysical views, ancient mythology, animal lore,
travelogues, and monkey allegories.
7
The cultural context of monkeys aside it was still difficult to sort
out the differences between the various specimens coming to
Europe with respect to age, gender and species. Only by the end of
the eighteenth century were chimpanzees and orangutans recog-
nized as different animals from Africa and Southeast Asia respec-
tively. The classification of gorillas as a separate species followed in
the 1840s and it was not until the 1930s that bonobos were seen as
separate from chimpanzees.
8
All of the apes to reach Europe alive
were juveniles and thus still much more alike than fully grown
adults which in combination with the sparse knowledge about the
great apes’anatomy and general appearance is part of the expla-
nation why all were classified as orangutans. They were more
similar to each other than they were to monkeys. The question then
was how similar were they to humans? Tulp exaggerated the
similarity and the humanness failing to notice, for example, that his
“orangutan”was incapable of walking fully erect. The physiology,
he argued, was almost identical to humans and even the behaviour
3
“I conceive that Lamarck was the first to bring it forward systematically & to “go
the whole orang.”Lyell to T. H. Huxley 17 June 1859, Imperial College Archives,
Huxley Papers 6:20, partly reprinted in Wilson (1970), p. 262. “When I came to the
conclusion that after all Lamarck was going to be shown to be right, and that we
must go the whole orang I re-read his book , and remembering when it was written,
I felt I had done him injustice.”Lyell to Darwin 15 March 1863,Burkhardt et al.
(1985-), 11:230e231.
4
“If the recognition of the near analogy of the human & the Orang type gives us
pain .”Wilson (1970), p. 165.
5
Corbey (2005), p. 9. Corbey provides an excellent discussion of primates and the
animal-human boundary in the history of anthropology.
6
Bontius (1658), cited in Blancke (2014), p. 33. Edward Tyson also remarked on
the ability to talk and the reason not to do it in his Philological Essay accompanying
Orang-Outang, sive Homo sylvestris (1699), p. 37. Commenting on Bontius’figure
Tyson remarked: “I can’t but think, he indulged more his Fancy herein, than copied
the true life”(Orang-Outang, sive Homo sylvestris, 19), also making more than one
note of the “pendulous large Breasts”(pp. 11 and 19). The sexual character of
Bontius’female orangutancontinued to attract attention well into the second half of
the nineteenth century in, for instance, Daniel Wilson’s evolutionary reading of
Shakespeare where it was described as “a female animal of human proportions and
pleasing features”,Wilson (1873),17.
7
Corbey (2005), p. 39.
8
See Blumenbach (1779), Camper (1782), Savage (1847) and Coolidge (1933).
Note that Savage still used “orang”as a generic term for gorillas.
J. van Wyhe, P.C. Kjærgaard / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 51 (2015) 53e6354
similar. For instance it wiped its mouth after drinking and it slept
with a blanket with its head on a pillow.
9
Apparently the first great ape to arrive in England came by boat
from Angola in 1698 and was put on display at a freak show in
London attracting considerable public attention, including that of
the anatomist Edward Tyson (1651e1708). The infant chimpanzee
or bonobo died three months after arrival from an infectious wound
contracted during the voyage and was meticulously dissected by
Tyson. The results were published the following year as Orang-
Outang, sive Homo sylvestris: or the anatomy of a Pygmie compared
with that of a monkey, an ape, and a man. To which is added, a phil-
ological essay concerning the pygmies, the cynocephali, the satyrs, and
sphinges of the Ancients. Wherein it will appear that they are all either
apes or monkeys, and not men, as formerly pretended. Tyson followed
the seventeenth-century consensus and called his ape an orang-
utan. He assumed that there were no differences between African
and Southeast Asian great apes because “some Sea-Captains and
Merchants who came to my House to see it, assured me, that they
had seen great many of them in Borneo,Sumatra, and other Parts,
tho’this was brought from Angola in Africa”.
10
With no direct
comparative experience of his own, the testimony of actual wit-
nesses seemed trustworthy.
11
In the careful comparison of his “orangutan”with humans and
two monkeys he counted anatomical differences and similarities.
Tyson noted that the number of similarities were significantly
higher with respect to humans than to monkeys with 48 more
human-like features versus 34 more monkey-like features. How-
ever, the significance of the many features closer to monkeys could
not be ignored and he concluded that his “orangutan”was neither
human nor monkey, but something in-between. It was not a
product of mixed species either, but a species in its own right: “our
Pygmie is no Man, nor yet the Common Ape; but a sort of Animal
between both; and tho’aBiped yet of the Quadromanus-kind [i.e.
four-handed]”.
12
Tyson’s“orangutan”was a link in the Great Chain of Being. It had
a body and a brain very similar to humans, but yet, it did not cross
the Rubicon of language. As such, for all the similarities’worth, they
fit the seventeenth-century frame of mind and helped to confirm
the gulf between humans and animals. The Great Chain of Being
was not a continuous scale, but a discrete ladder of God’s creations
with the orangutan supplying the step before humans. It was an
important step closer to humans, but still a step below. The ape was
physically equipped to speak, but lacked the spiritual qualities to do
so.
13
In the eighteenth century the Swedish taxonomist Carolus Lin-
naeus (1707e1778) took the step Tyson refrained from and placed
the orangutan firmly with humans in his great scheme of classi-
fying the living world. In the tenth edition of his monumentally
influential Systema naturae (1758) he put humans in the order
primates, that included the three genera Homo,Simia, and Lemur.In
the genus Homo he distinguished between two human species,
Homo sapiens (Homo diurnus) and Homo troglodytes (Homo noc-
turnus), the latter including H. sylvestris Orang-Outang. Thus, Bon-
tius’orangutan and Tulp’s and Tyson’s chimpanzees narrowly
managed not to be included in the crowded genus Simia, but
instead luxuriated in the exclusive Homo genus. It was almost hu-
man, not with articulate language, but able to speak using hissing
sounds.
14
Linnaeus’classification, however, generated strong reactions
among eighteenth-century naturalists, including Georges-Luis
Leclerc de Buffon (1707e1788) and his co-author Louis Dau-
benton (1716e1799) in France, and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach
(1752e1840) in Germany. Central to the debate was the question
how human the great apes were? Were they evidence of a con-
tinuum fixing humans firmly in the animal kingdom or were they
proof of God’s creation of separate species, discretely organised
with humans at the very top? Buffon and Blumenbach answered
the latter in the affirmative. Opposed to Linnaeus’focus on struc-
tural morphology, they stressed functional morphology. The
defining characteristics were not if a species had certain organs or
not, but whether they were able to put them to any use. Buffon did
not believe Linnaeus on the question of the orangutans’ability to
speak and dismissed them from the inner circles of the human
family on these grounds. Forcing a Cartesian dualism on the animal
world, humans were saved by language and all that followed.
Blumenbach concurred and even questioned previous accounts of
bipedality. Orangutans, he claimed, were only occasionally stand-
ing on their feet, not at all like humans who used the upright
posture as one of the main features and advantages over other
animals.
Blumenbach’s was more than a scientific interest. He was
determined to defend human uniqueness and his emphasis on
functional rather than structural morphology was used deliberately
to drive home the point. As he wrote to the Swiss anatomist and
naturalist Albrecht von Haller (1708e1777) in 1775, Blumenbach
would stand up “to defend the rights of mankind and to contest the
ridiculous association with the true ape, the orang-utan”.
15
The
Dutch anatomist Petrus Camper (1722e1789) seized an opportu-
nity to dissect a series of infant orangutans and other non-human
primates in the 1770s. He would confirm Blumenbach’s distinc-
tion between the African chimpanzee and the Asian orangutan.
However, while Blumenbach gave new names to the different
speciesdSimia troglodytes for chimpanzees and Simia satyrus for
orangutans emphasising his disagreement with Linnaeus’classifi-
cation that put the great apes in the same genus Homo as
humansdCamper kept the orangutan name and merely pointed
out the geographical differences. By the end of the eighteenth
century more orangutans and chimpanzees had reached Europe
creating a better understanding of their physiology and appear-
ances. They were still special and rare, but no longer mythological
figures. They had become objects of scientific scrutiny and were
now central to ideological discussions about humans’place in
nature.
Parallel to those delineating apes and humans there were others
who followed Linnaeus by including the great apes and humans in
the same family. The French philosopher Jean-Jaques Rousseau
(1712e1778) and the Scottish judge James Burnett (1714e1799),
better known as Lord Monboddo, stressed the difference as one in
degree, not an absolute boundary. Indeed, the generic orangutans
were seen as representatives of humans in their natural state. To
Rousseau the orangutans reported by travellers might be “a race of
genuine wild men, dispersed in the woods in ancient times without
the possibility of developing any of its virtual faculties, without
having acquired any degree of perfection, still living in the primitive
9
Tulp (1641); see Blancke (2014),p.33.
10
Tyson (1699), p. 2.
11
Trust was central in relying on first-hand testimonies for substantiating work in
natural history. In nineteenth-century anthropology this was still very much the
case. See Sera-Shriar (2013) for a discussion of how observational practices in an-
thropology developed from natural history, geography, and medicine.
12
Tyson (1699), p. 91. The comparison of similarities with humans and monkeys
appears on pages 92e95.
13
Corbey (2005), pp. 40e41; Ritvo (2005), pp. 483e483; Blancke (2014), pp.
34e35.
14
Linneaus (1758); Broberg (1983); Blancke (2014), pp. 35e36; Ritvo (2005),
p. 484.
15
Quoted in Corbey (2005), p. 50.
J. van Wyhe, P.C. Kjærgaard / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 51 (2015) 53e63 55
state of nature”.
16
Happy and free, leading the natural uncorrupted
life of the golden age of humanity, the exact opposite of the Hob-
bessian state of a perpetual war of all against all, Rousseau’s orangs
provided a normative standard for the good and natural way to live.
Monboddo’s orangutan was equally human and a model of
“natural man”living peacefully in a warm and welcoming climate
from the fruits of the earth. The only reason the orangutans had no
language was because there was no need for it. Based upon one
stuffed orangutan in the French King’s cabinet of curiosities, two
live specimens in London and a series of travellers’accounts,
Monboddo was confident enough to speak with authority on the
nature and behaviour of his very human orangutans: “He has the
sense of what is decent and becoming, which is peculiar to man,
and distinguishes him from the brute as much as anything else”.
Furthermore, “he has a sense of honour; for he cannot bear to be
exposed as a show, nor to be laughed at; and travellers mention
examples of some of them having died of vexation, for being so
treated. He has also the feeling of humanity in a strong degree; and
a sense of justice”.
17
But Monboddo did not stop there. The
orangutans, he claimed, had also made serious cultural progress
building huts, used sticks as weapons, used fire and buried their
dead. They were indeed of the same species as humans and one
should not be fooled by the fact that they had not yet invented
language.
18
3. Orangutans in England
The literary potential of orangutans did not pass unnoticed and
found its way into numerous stories and illustrations. Inverting the
idea of the Missing Link as a filthy aberration in Melincourt (1817)
Thomas Love Peacock (1785e1866) staged his hero Sir Oran Haut-
Ton as the impeccable and chivalrous silent rescuer of the prover-
bial damsel in distress. It did not matter at all that he had not ac-
quired language after arriving in England from his native Borneo.
Edgar Allen Poe (1809e1849) on the other hand continued the
tradition of the orangutan as a wild brute. It was ultimately
revealed that an orangutan committed the extremely violent
Murders in Rue Morgue (1841 ). The orangutan was heard speaking
in a foreign tongue and using a humanly impossible escape route.
Poe’s story contrasted the beastly orangutan with the intelligence
of the ‘detective’Auguste Dupin, later the model for Arthur Conan
Doyle’s (1859e1930) Sherlock Holmes. The orangutan was once
again a divide instead of a continuum between humans and ani-
mals.
19
The early nineteenth-century English speaking public and
the scientific community alike were well acquainted with “orang-
utans”in their African and Southeast Asian forms. They were
indeed a familiar image in the public and the scientific imagination
when Darwin and Wallace met their first orangs.
It was widely believed that the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste
Lamarck (1744e1829) proposed a scandalously direct line of
descent from orangutans to humans. In his Philosophie Zoologique
(1809) Lamarck had indeed proposed that humans had probably
come into existence through transmutation from an ape. This
would have happened as a quadromanous (four-handed) ape had
begun to walk upright and reached superiority over other animals.
Lamarck’s theory of transmutation of species was radical enough in
itself, but the idea that he was thought to suggest the orangutan as
an ancestral species to humans was most disturbing. Lamarck still
used orang as the name for all the great apes and in fact he argued
that of all the “orangs”the apes of Angola (chimpanzees) were
more advanced than the eastern “orangs”(orangutans).
20
He was
indeed correct in assuming that the chimpanzees were more
similar to humans than orangutans. But they were all orangutans to
Lamarck.
It was precisely the proposed beastly link with orangutans that
made Lyell reject Lamarck’s evolutionary theory and devote more
than two chapters of Principles of Geology (1830e3) to a summary
and refutation of it.
21
Lyell mocked Lamarck for proposing a “pro-
gressive scheme, whereby the orang-outang, having been already
evolved out of a monad, is made slowly to attain the attributes and
dignity of man.”
22
At the time of writing the Principles of Geology
the absurdity of linking the orangutan with the human form divine
was reason enough for Lyell to dismiss evolution and to expect and
receive considerable agreement from his peers.
The same year that Lyell’s book appeared, the Zoological Garden
in Regent’s Park acquired its first living orangutan. The young male
lived only three days after its arrival. It was then dissected by the
great anatomist Richard Owen (1804e1892).
23
In 1835 he wrote an
important paper on orangutans finding that it had fewer anatom-
ical characters that resembled humans compared to chimpanzees
and gorillas.
24
In 1836e7 a heated Giraffe House for the Zoological
Gardens was built by Decimus Burton (1800e1881). The west end
of this building would provide a space for an orangutan cage. In
November 1837 the Zoological Society purchased a young female
orangutan (c. 3 years) from a sailor named Mr Moss just returned
from Borneo. She was named Lady Jane, usually shortened to Jenny.
She lived until 28 May 1839 when she died from illness. The
Zoological Gardens acquired another orangutan, a male called
Tommy, in May 1838, who lived only until October. Another female,
also called Jenny, was purchased in December 1839. She lived until
October 1843.
25
This Jenny was visited by Queen Victoria (1819e
1901) and Prince Albert (1819e1861) in May 1842. The Queen
recorded in her diary “The Orang-Outang is too wonderful pre-
paring and drinking his tea, doing everything by word of command.
He is frightful & painfully and disagreeably human”.
26
4. When Darwin met Jenny
In 1838 Charles Darwin was back in London, after the voyage of
the Beagle, working on his collections and starting to develop his
theory of transmutation or evolution. He had become a corre-
sponding member in 1831 so he was free to visit the Zoological
Society’s Gardens and experiment with the animals. In late March
he visited the Gardens and described his visit in a letter to his sister
Susan:
I saw also the Ourang-outang in great perfection: the keeper
showed her an apple, but would not give it her, whereupon she
threw herself on her back, kicked & cried, precisely like a
naughty child.dShe then looked very sulky & after two or three
fits of pashion, the keeper said, “Jenny if you will stop bawling &
be a good girl, I will give you the apple.dShe certainly
16
Rousseau (1755), p. 215; cited in Corbey (2005), p. 55.
17
Monboddo (1795); cited in Blancke (2014), p. 40.
18
Blancke (2014); Corbey (2005), pp. 54e58; van Wyhe (2005), p. 95.
19
Peacock (1817); Poe (1841); See Beer (1992), pp. 21e22.
20
Lamarck (1809); Bowler (1986), pp. 61e62.
21
Lyell, (1830e3), Volume 2, p. 14ff. Lyell also used ‘orang’for chimpanzees.
Lamark himself seems to have meant the Asian animal.
22
Lyell, (1830e3).
23
Owen (1830). See Rupke (2009).
24
Owen (1835).
25
‘Occurrences at the Gardens, 1839,’MS, Zoological Society of London; LRO, 1:
193 e94, 206. No evidence has been found that the remains (hide or skeleton) of any
of the orang utans called Jenny were preserved either in the ZSL Museum or
elsewhere. We are grateful to Kees Rookmaaker for answering this and other
queries.
26
Blunt (1976), p. 38.
J. van Wyhe, P.C. Kjærgaard / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 51 (2015) 53e6356
understood every word of this, &, though like a child, she had
great work to stop whining, she at last succeeded, & then got the
apple, with which she jumped into an arm chair & began eating
it, with the most contented countenance imaginable.
27
During this and subsequent visits in September and October, Darwin
made a series of observations and experiments with the orangutans.
He made notes based on these visits in his transmutation notebooks
and in a previously unpublished document now in the Darwin
Archive at Cambridge University Library (DAR 191).
28
As the notes reveal, Darwin’s orangutan observations were
clearly part of his interest in evolution and specifically human
evolution. Indeed the DAR 191 notes on orangutans were catego-
rized by Darwin as on “Man”dnot orangutans. It would have been
difficult not to be reminded of humans as Jenny was dressed in
human clothes and taught to drink tea and perform other human
activities to amuse visitors (Fig. 1). As they have not been previously
published Darwin’s notes are quoted in full to demonstrate the line
and development of Darwin’s thinking about orang-utans and hu-
man evolution, including his speculations about early human
behaviour:
[1] Man
29
Quoted
Sunday September 2
d
Zoological Gardens
M
r
Youatt
30
(great veterinary surgeon) says he has not the
slightest doubt that many monkeys, especially the Rhesus, & the
great dog faced baboon know women perfectly eshow un-
equivocally. d
Waterhouse
31
& every keeper state the fact to be certain
How wonderful. early men have seen women naked, must then
smell & afterwards association by sight ethis is most curious, as
proof of origin of mankind dthe ourang outangs however when
first placed together seem to have look trusted to sight & not
smell for knowing sexual difference.d
The ourang outang have less expression than the Macacos from
not moving the skin of forehead. d& as they have scarcely any
eyebrows, the relation may be from want of hair. d
they were like a child when annoyed, d& do not show by
expression of countenance pleasure e
Are curious, particularly fond of watching boys bathe
[1 verso] Jenny was decidedly jealous, showing her displeasure
by showing teeth
32
& making peevish noise [fist tight]&re
turning her back djust the same as when food was shown her &
not given her. d
A Dog when jealous, perhaps should be called envious come up
& try to push away the one you are petting. sometime barks &
bays but it is a half good humoured way. I do not think I ever saw
a dog really cross. though I have seen one jump up & move off.
[2] in canal emost curious to see how Jenny understood when
told door open, to give up anything, & to do what she is told,
open doors, stand in proper position to be combed.
Isaw¼make swing of straw in whisp ¼
33
In play she arrange straw in row, stuffing it through cage, like
silly listless child dPlayed with two sticks, carrying them
climbing up with them & trying to reach them dhas is very
fond of playing with anything soft, covered itself herself up with
two pocket handkerchiefs just like girl with shawl spread them
out dconsidered them as her property would not give them up
to me. but the keeper brought them & gave them. followed me &
bit me for having taken it away & tried to pick my pocket. d
She is fond of breaking sticks & in overturning things to do this
(& she is quite strong) she places tries the lever placing stick in
hole & going to end as I saw. dShe will take the whip [3] &
strike the giraffes, & take a stick & beat the men. dWhen a dog
comes in she will take hold of anything, the keepers say,
decidedly from knowing she will be able to hurt more with
these than with paw. dthis is just as curious as D
r
Smith’s story
of throwing stones. dLikes being noticed & if not so will hurt &
bite the little male, mainly because keepers think, she does it to
vex the keeper as being naughty.
Likes playing with a cat, but dislikes most animals. dThe
Chimpanzee formerly used to be much frightened at soldiers.
Fig. 1. In 1838 Charles Darwin made a series of observations and experiments with the
two orangutans, Tommy and Jenny, at the London Zoo. Drawing of Jenny sitting on a
chair. ÓThe British Library Board.
27
Darwin to Susan Darwin [1 April 1838] Burkhardt et al. (1985-) vol. 2, p. 80.
28
Barrett, Gautrey, Herbert, Kohn, & Smith (1987).
29
This document is written on two folded sheets of cream-coloured paper with
no watermarks. The writing is in greyish ink except where otherwise noted. Orig-
inal page numbers in brackets. “Man”is in red pencil or crayon. This indicated that
these notes were filed in Darwin’s portfolio of notes on human evolution. We are
quoting DAR 191 in full as it has never been published. Reproduced with permission
of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
30
William Youatt, veterinary surgeon in London and author of books on domestic
animals.
31
George Robert Waterhouse, mammalogist and entomologist. Keeper of Miner-
alogy and Geology at the British Museum (Natural History) and friend of Darwin’s.
32
Underlined in blue pencil.
33
I saw ¼make swing of straw in whip ¼]added pencil.
J. van Wyhe, P.C. Kjærgaard / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 51 (2015) 53e63 57
She was so vexed & peevish & shook the cage & knocked her
head against door because she could not get out. d
jealous of attention to other. dput her hand out slowly & then
seize suddenly what she wanted dmade ugly faces (especially
at the glass) [4] Does not like being tickled under the arms. Tried
to strike me & showed teeth, when I tried to plague her, with
showing her food & not giving it her.
Both were astonished beyond measure at looking glass, looked
at it every way, sideways, & with most steady surprise.
34
dafter
some time stuck out lips, like kissing, to glass, & then the two did
when they were first put together. dat last put hand behind
glass at various distances, looked over it, rubbed front of glass,
made faces at it dexamined whole glass dput face quite close
& pressed it dat last half refused to look at it dstartled &
seemed almost frightened, & evidently became cross because it
could not understand puzzle. dPut body in all kinds of posi-
tions when approaching glass to examine it. d[5] The two
ourangs sleep together & snore much d
Are attached to two of the keepers & to no one else
These notes make clear that Darwin’s observations were aimed
particularly at recording evidence that purportedly human behav-
iours and emotions were present in apes which he took to be our
actual relatives, though not direct ancestors.
35
This would allow
him to argue that the difference between humans and animals was
one of degree, not of kind. Difference by degree could be explained
by his nascent theory of branching evolutionary descent. Therefore,
human beings were descended from earlier apes. Anatomy alone
already suggested some form of relationship. But far more specific
and chilling details were evident in their emotions and behaviour.
Around April 1838 he wrote in a famous notebook passage:
Let man visit Ourang-outang in domestication, hear expressive
whine, see its intelligence when spoken [to], as if it understood
every word said dsee its affection to those it knows, dsee its
passion & rage, sulkiness & very extremeof despair; let him look
at savage, roasting his parent, naked, artless, not improving, yet
improvable, and then let him dare to boast of his proud pre-
eminence. dNot understanding language of Fuegian puts on
par with monkeys.
36
The DAR 191 notes reveal that Darwin saw the orangutans more
than anything as “like a child”. This suggests that they were rudi-
mentally human. Specifically, they revealed human-like emotions.
They expressed that they were “annoyed”,“jealous”,“peevish”or
“cross”. But could one not describe a dog in the same way? Further
notes on orangutan expression were entered in Darwin’s note-
books. He noted the orangutans’ability to pout and whine, to go
into “a passion”and an awareness of “fear or shame.”
37
Showing
our teeth when we smile would later be used by Darwin to declare
the obvious derivation of humans from apes.
Darwin was also convinced that “Jenny understood”human
language. Signs of orangutan intelligence were recorded not only
from their ability to recognize spoken words but their reactions to a
looking glass, ability to untie knots and curiosity about skin colour
and pleasure in music.
38
Darwin also noted cases of the orangutans
using tools including taking a whip to the giraffes and beating men
with sticks!
39
He noted that “these cases of commonly using,
foreign bodies, for end. most important step in progression”.In
some now lost notes, Darwin also recorded that orangutans had
handedness.
40
Ultimately Darwin’s observations on orangutans
were published in his books The descent of man (1871) and espe-
cially in the Expression of the emotions (1872).
Darwin’s troubling experience of witnessing the hunter-
gatherer tribes of Yahgans in Tierra del Fuego may explain his
view of orangutans as of such direct relevance to humans and his
unusual lack of discomfort to relate apes and humans. The Yahgans
had convinced him that the distance between highly civilized
humans and the most degraded animal-like savages was narrow
indeed. And therefore the much exalted differences between
humans and animals were greatly exaggerated. It was thus only a
small and painless step further to see great apes as human cousins.
5. Wallace meets orangutans
The circumstances of Wallace’s observations of orangutans
could not have been more different than Darwin’s in the genteel
setting of the Zoological Gardens. Wallace was on his second and
final collecting expedition. In 1855 he sailed from Singapore to
Sarawak, Borneo where he spent 17 months collecting insects,
birds, terrestrial shells and mammals. Sarawak was ruled by the
swashbuckling Englishman Sir James Brooke (1803e1868), known
as the White Rajah. Wallace stayed intermittently with Sir James
during this time. One of Wallace’s acquaintances in Sarawak later
wrote a recollection of Wallace in Sarawak which is often quoted
and has proved disproportionately influential. Spenser St John
(1825e1910) was Brooke’s secretary and from 1851 Acting
Commissioner and Consul General, Britain’s diplomatic represen-
tative in Borneo. St John wrote in 1879:
We had at this time in Sarawak the famous naturalist, traveller,
and philosopher, Mr Alfred Wallace, who was then elaborating
in his mind the theory which was simultaneously worked out by
Darwindthe theory of the origin of species; and if he could not
convince us that our ugly neighbours, the orang-outangs, were
our ancestors, he pleased, delighted, and instructed us by his
clever and inexhaustible flow of talkdreally good talk. The
Rajah was pleased to have soclever a man with him, as it excited
his mind, and brought out his brilliant ideas.
41
As so little evidence survives of Wallace’s early views, this quota-
tion has for many years filled the gap and led many writers from
McKinney (1972) and Brooks (1984) onwards to conclude that
Wallace believed humans were descended from orangutans. For
example, Desmond and Moore (1992) claimed that Wallace wanted
to go to the East: “including Borneo, the land of orangutans, where
he hoped to gain clues to man’s ancestry.”
42
Janet Browne later
depicted Wallace as heading to the East to “pursue his ideas about
human origins”.
43
But there exists no evidence of any kind to
support the view that Wallace went to the East to study human
origins nor that he thought orangutans would be relevant to such
studies prior to his departure. Such claims are an extrapolation
solely from St John’s retrospective remark.
34
This experiment is recounted in Darwin (1872), p. 142.
35
Brief comments appear on human phylogeny in his Notebook C, see Barrett et al.
(1987), pp. 174, 234).
36
Barrett et al. (1987),Notebook C p. 79.
37
See Notebook N in Barrett et al. (1987).
38
Skin colour made it into the 2nd edition of Darwin’sJournal of researches (1845),
p. 209. For music see Barrett et al. (1987),Notebook M, p. 156.
39
Barrett et al. (1987),Notebook M, p.p 138, 140, DAR191.
40
Darwin to William Ogle 25 December 1871 Burkhardt et al. (1985-), vol. 19:747:
“I found an old memorandum the other day written between 30 & 40 years ago; in
which I inferred that a young Orang was right handed from the manner in which it
transferred a spoon that I had placed in its left hand to the right hand before using
it.”The memorandum has not been found.
41
St. John (1879),p.274.
42
Desmond & Moore (1992), p. 467.
43
Browne (2002), vol. 2, p. 29.
J. van Wyhe, P.C. Kjærgaard / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 51 (2015) 53e6358
We know that Wallace was persuaded to accept some form of
evolutionary theory by reading Vestiges of the natural history of
creation (1844; see below) in 1845. However, we know almost
nothing specific about what Wallace accepted or rejected from his
reading. One can probably safely assume that Wallace believed that
humans were also part of a natural evolutionary process. Vestiges
did not have humans come from orangutans, but just from apes in
general as suggested by anatomical and embryological
resemblances.
The best and most contemporaneous evidence we have of
Wallace’s views around the time he observed living orangutans
stems from a few years after and occurs in a marginal comment in
his copy of Darwin’sOrigin of species (1859). Darwin had described
how two quite distinct modern species could be derived from a
common ancestor: “So with natural species, if we look to forms very
distinct, for instance to the horse and tapir, we have no reason to
suppose that links ever existed directly intermediate between
them, but between each and an unknown common parent.”
44
To
this Wallace noted in the margin: “So with the orangutan & man.”
45
The evidence we have of Wallace’s views connecting orangutans
with human origins comes from after he formulated his version of
natural selection and after reading the Origin of Species. Then he
viewed humans and orangutans as descended from a common
ancestor and did not think that humans were derived from
orangutans. In other words, we have no evidence that Wallace was
thinking about orangutans and human evolution before going to
Southeast Asia. Only in latter years would Wallace make the
connection explicitly, which led to an important conversation with
Charles Lyell.
In March 1855 Wallace sailed from Sarawak up the coast of
Borneo to the Si Munjon river where he lived at a new coal works
for eight months. It was a marshy and heavily forested area and
home to a flourishing population of orangutans. Most of Wallace’s
observations and collections of orangutans were made between 19
March and 24 June 1855.
46
Wallace shot and procured as many orangutan specimens as he
could. They were some of the most valuable specimens he collected
in the East. To modern readers Wallace’s account of firing dozens of
small calibre lead balls into orangutans in the canopy makes
shocking reading. Wallace, however, seems to have viewed
orangutans at the time as more animal than man. His first
encounter with a monkey in South America is a good example. A
small monkey was shot. “The poor little animal was not quite dead”,
Wallace recollected, “and its cries, its innocent-looking counte-
nance, and delicate little hands were quite childlike. Having often
heard how good monkey was, I took it home, and had it cut up and
fried for breakfast”.
47
Wallace preserved his orangutan skins and skeletons for sale by
his agent in London. He made measurements of their bodies and
recorded details of their behaviour such as their movements
through the canopy, diet, sleeping nests and solitary nature. He
hoped to settle the current confusion about the number of species
in Borneo. In later years hears he would publish a great deal based
on his observations.
48
But none of these pursuits was unique to orangutans. They were
an exotic and fascinating creature to be sure-especially because of
their resemblance to humans. But they were also just another an-
imal specimen. He used the conventional language of the times to
describe them as monsters. One female he shot was “was running
about the tree like a mad woman”.
49
Even years later when Wallace
published his Malay archipelago, the frontispiece to the first volume
depicted a savage or enraged orangutan biting open the arm of a
native Dyak who had attacked it with a spear (Fig. 2).
50
Wallace’s most prolonged contact with an orangutan was with
the infant he found after shooting its mother down from the can-
opy. He reared the baby for almost three months until it died. Like
many of the accounts of Jenny in London, Wallace described his
“baby”in mock human terms as a form of humour. The orangutan’s
expressions were a great “amusement”. Wallace carefully observed
and recorded the behaviour of the orangutan, which he did not
name nor did he record that he spoke to it or that it understood
spoken language. Curiously, Wallace also procured a young long-
tailed macaque to keep his orangutan baby company. Wallace
named the monkey Toby but apparently never named the
orangutan.
51
Most of Wallace’s descriptions refer to “its expressive counte-
nance”hence, for him, it could not be a monkey.
52
Wallace found
Fig. 2. “Orang Utan attacked by Dyaks”Frontispiece to Alfred Russel Wallace’sMalay
Archipelago, vol. 1 (1869). Drawn by Josef Wolf and engraved on wood by James Davis
Cooper. ÓJohn van Wyhe ed., Wallace Online (http://wallace-online.org/).
44
Darwin (1859), p. 281.
45
Beddall (1988), p. 283. The note was presumably written in 1860 when Wallace
received his copy from Darwin.
46
For more detail on this part of Wallace’s collecting expedition see van Wyhe
(2013), pp. 113e133 van Wyhe and Rookmaaker eds., (2013), pp. 32e57.
47
Wallace (1853), p. 42.
48
Wallace’s principal publications on orangutans are: Wallace (1856a, 1856b,
1856c, 1856d, 1869). See also Wallace’s letters which discuss orangutans:
Wallace to G.R. Waterhouse, 8 May 1855; to F. Sims, 25 June 1855; to S. Stevens,
10 March 1856 and 12 May 1856 in van Wyhe and Rookmaaker eds., (2013).
49
Wallace to Frances Sims, 25 June 1855. van Wyhe and Rookmaaker eds., (2013),
p. 48.
50
A new fully annotated edition of Wallace’s book has just appeared, see van
Wyhe ed. (2015).
51
van Wyhe ed. (2015).
52
Wallace (1856a, 1856b, 1856c, 1856d), p. 326.
J. van Wyhe, P.C. Kjærgaard / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 51 (2015) 53e63 59
that “the workings of its countenance express so many feelings and
passions.”
53
Wallace recorded despair, disgust, approval, dislike,
and satisfaction/contentment. Adults in the forest expressed “rage”
when being fired at. Much later he told Darwin “As soon as their
laughter ceases, an expression may be detected passing over their
faces, which.may be called a smile.”
54
Describing his infant orang
in the Malay Archipelago Wallace wrote:
it was a never-failing amusement to observe the curious
changes of countenance by which it would express its approval
or dislike of what was given to it. The poor little thing would lick
its lips, draw in its cheeks, and turn up its eyes with an
expression of the most supreme satisfaction when it had a
mouthful particularly to its taste. On the other hand, when its
food was not sufficiently sweet or palatable, it would turn the
mouthful about with its tongue for a moment as if trying to
extract what flavour there was, and then push it all out between
its lips. If the same food was continued, it would set up a scream
and kick about violently, exactly like a baby in a passion.
55
These could all be claimed as anthropomorphic, but one could
equally apply these emotions to a dog. After it died Wallace pre-
served its skin and skeleton as commercial specimens.
56
We see nothing about a search for human origins in Wallace’s
observations of orangutans. Indeed although he was actively pur-
suing his private interests in evolutionary theory at exactly this
time, his notes on orangutans contain no mention of human origins
or evolution. Judging from his notes, it was the general truth of the
grand process of common descent over the course of the history of
life on earth that interested Wallace at this time, not the derivation
of any particular species, including humans.
57
Thus Wallace took
very different conclusions from his contact with orangutans from
Darwin’s.
6. From Jenny to Java
After the publication of the Origin of species (1859), however,
things changed and others began to connect extant apes with
postulated extinct common ancestors. But the new evolutionary
thinking was still often intertwined with traditional ideas of a Great
Chain of Being. For critics of evolution the gaps in the fossil record
looked like flaws. For adherents, however, they were challenges to
overcome. In popular as well as scientific contexts these gaps were
described as missing links. When potential candidates from the
entire spectrum of the animal kingdom were found they were sen-
sations to the press and successes for science. The Archaeopteryx, for
example, was celebrated as such after its first discovery in 1861.
Richard Owen described it two years later as a primitive long-tailed
bird and was thus still able to explain it within his framework of
variations of ideal archetypes. Not surprisingly, Thomas Henry
Huxley (1825e1895) disagreed. Putting forward his theory of a close
relationship between dinosaurs and birds in 1868, the Archaeopteryx
was seen as an intermediate form between the otherwise widely
separated groups. The fossil star, however, was Compsognathus. The
small bipedal dinosaur discovered in Solnhofen, Germany, in 1859
was seen as most bird-like of all and was thus interpreted as a clear-
cut candidate for the title of a missing link.
58
Among the many different and exciting potential gap-filling
contestants the ultimate prize would nonetheless go to fossil
humans or intermediate forms documenting pre-human ances-
tors.
59
The Neanderthal looked promising for a while following its
discovery in 1856. But Huxley dismissed it’s status as a missing link
and concluded after a lengthy comparative study of human and
fossil bones in Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863) that “In no
sense, then, can the Neanderthal bones be regarded as the remains
of a human being intermediate between Men and Apes”. Looking to
the living great apes he asserted that “there is no existing link
between Man and the Gorilla”.
60
But one should be careful not to
exaggerate this point as there were no transitional forms between
the gorilla, the orangutan and the gibbon as no fossil apes had been
found at this stage, and yet the close family ties between the great
apes were not disputed. Comparing ape and human brains Richard
Owen was clinging to the idea that human uniqueness could be
found in the superior and exceptional human brain. He even sug-
gested not only to leave humans alone in a separate order, but in an
entire subclass of mammals called Archencephala which he justified
on the basis of humans’mental powers. A consensus was forming
against Owen in the early 1860s. Multiple studies of primate brains
including orangutans’confirmed similarities not differences be-
tween humans and apes.
61
Huxley’s own comparative studies of
primate and human anatomy were part of that wave. In the chapter
“On the natural history of the man-like apes”Huxley meticulously
recorded the history of discovery of the great apes of Africa and
Southeast Asia. His historical sketch was followed by a thorough
investigation of everything known about the anatomy and behav-
iour of gibbons, orangutans, chimpanzees and gorillas, including a
fairly balanced evaluation of Owen’s contributions and mis-
apprehensions. The gibbons were the best documented, but the
African apes were the least studied. And it was the latter, which,
according to Huxley, “most nearly approaches man”.
62
Still, it was the orangutan that got most of the attention. Wallace
was seen as a leading orangutan expert and his accounts taken on
authority.
63
As a field naturalist Huxley had the greatest respect for
Wallace and, explaining to his readers how reliable scientific
knowledge came about, put that respect in print: “Once in a gen-
eration, a Wallace may be found physically, mentally, and morally
qualified to wander unscathed through the tropical wilds of
America and Asia; to form magnificent collections as he wanders;
and withal to think out sagaciously the conclusions suggested by
his collections”.
64
Huxley’s orangutan narrative was built upon
multiple sources, but few were praised like Wallace although it
remained unclear exactly what about the nature of the orangutans
came from him. Although Huxley did not think the Neanderthal
fossil discovered in 1856 to be a fossil ancestorda point confirmed
by Lyell in the same year (1863) and later by Edward Clodd (1840e
1930) looking back at the nineteenth century’s research on
“primitive man”dthe interest in finding one did not wane.
65
The
question was where to look.
Huxley concluded his essay undecided. In the Descent of Man
(1871), Darwin tentatively suggested Africa because there were
more species there that were related to humans than in Asia.
66
Lyell
53
Wallace (1856a,1856b, 1856c,1856d), p. 326. http://wallace-online.org/content/
frameset?pageseq¼1&itemID¼S030&viewtype¼text.
54
Reported in Darwin (1872), p. 132.
55
Wallace (1869), Volume 1, pp. 68e69.
56
On Wallace’s orangutan specimens see Cranbrook, Hills, McCarthy, & Prys-Jones
(2005).
57
See Wallace (1864).
58
Owen (1863);Huxley (1868); see also Wellnhofer (2010), pp. 241e242.
59
For an introduction to the idea of the Missing Link in human evolution in a
popular and scientific contexts see Bowler (1986); Beer (1992); Goodall (2002);
Gundling (2005); Clark (2009); Kjærgaard (2010, 2011, 2012a); Reader (2011).
60
Huxley (1863), pp. 157 and 104.
61
Wilson (1996).
62
Huxley (1863), p. 70.
63
Huxley (1863), pp. 31e34.
64
Huxley (1863), pp. 24e25.
65
Huxley (1863);Lyell (1863), chap. 5; Clodd (1895), pp.62e63.
66
Huxley (1963), p. 159; Darwin (1871), vol. 1, p. 199; Kjærgaard (2011), p. 84.
J. van Wyhe, P.C. Kjærgaard / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 51 (2015) 53e6360
had eventually and reluctantly been convinced of the correctness of
evolutionary theory, even including humans. In Antiquity of Man
(1863), published a few months after Huxley’sMan’s Place in Na-
ture, Lyell cautiously remarked on the likelihood of finding “records
of the missing links alluded to”dthe absence of gradational forms
of recent and extinct mammalia. To search forhuman ancestors one
would have to look in either the tropical parts of Africa or in Borneo
or Sumatra in Southeast Asia. Based on the geological and palae-
ontological record Europe and the Americas were ruled out.
67
In his
correspondence with the American naturalist George Ticknor
(1791e1871), Lyell was enthusiastic about the prospects of taking
the next big step in understanding the ancestry of humans
following a private suggestion from Wallace to take a closer look at
certain limestone caves in Borneo: “I hope to get extinct Ourangs, if
not the missing link itself”.
68
Nothing but enthusiasm for the idea came out of this, however.
But it fuelled the interest to look towards Asia for the fossil an-
cestors of modern humans. Wallace was not convinced about the
African theory and more inclined to think about Asia as the most
likely birthplace of humanity. In his Darwinism (1889), he argued
that it was understandable that “we have as yet met with no traces
of the missing links”, because of the vastness of the area and that
“no part of the world is so entirely unexplored by the geologist as
this very region”.
69
As Huxley had suggested in Man’s Place in Na-
ture, for Wallace it was merely a matter of time before the evidence
would appear. And indeed only a few years later a discovery was
made in Java, suggesting that Wallace might be right after all. The
orangutan and the gibbon suggested an approximate geographical
location for the common ancestor of humans and great apes. Now it
was a matter of finding fossils that would fill some of the gaps.
Asia had gradually attracted more attention as the cradle of
humankind. Already twenty years earlier in the anonymously
published and notorious Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
(1844), for example, the Scottish journalist and publisher Robert
Chambers (1802e1871) speculated among many other things about
the evolutionary origins of humankind. He was undecided whether
or not humans had one or multiple ancestors. Africans, for instance,
he thought so different from the rest of the world’s population that
they might have had an independent origin. In the end, he favoured
Asia, specifically the north of India as the cradle of humanity. Under
the assumption that humans did indeed constitute a single species,
he traced the migration patterns of what was known about
different populations and tribes, languages, religions and other
cultural signifiers. Adding origin myths to what was known about
the great apes, he concluded: “we should expect man to have
originated where the highest species of the quadrumana [primates]
are to be found. Now these are unquestionably found in the Indian
Archipelago”.
70
This was the usual name for the Malay archipelago.
Chambers criticised the ornithologist William Swainson (1789e
1855), who had used orangutans to argue against the idea of
comparing the order of nature to links in a chain, for not seeing that
the similarity between orangutans and humans implied at least “a
certain relation”. This did not pass unnoticed and Vestiges was
publicly ridiculed for suggesting that humans sprang from mon-
keys or ourangutans.
71
In the second half of the nineteenth century the game had
changed. The actual family relationship between humans and apes
was no longer disputed among evolutionists, but the scientific
investigation of the family resemblances and the search for fossil
ancestors had entered an entirely different mode from earlier
speculations. With so few humanlike fossils there was still plenty of
space and need for imagination in constructing hypotheses of hu-
man origins. The German naturalist Ernst Haeckel (1834e1919 ) was
not shy about making bold claims. In The History of Creation, pub-
lished in German in 1868 and in an English translation in 1876,
Haeckel argued that what he saw as the four humanlike apes each
had something most in common with humans. With the orangutan
it was the brain, with the chimpanzee it was the skull, with the
gorilla the feet and hands, and for the gibbon it was the thorax. It
was impossible to determine on this basis which ape was most
closely related to humans. Following Darwin, he was sure that none
of them were ancestral. There had been, Haeckel maintained, an
intermediate stage between tailless apes and humans that had now
gone extinct and would be represented somewhere in the fossil
record. These ape-like men, a higher order than the man-like apes,
differed from humans in the sense that they would have lacked the
ability to speak. Haeckel therefore named his hypothetical Missing
Link connecting humans with the deep evolutionary ape past
Pithecanthropus alalus, speechless ape-man.
72
With regard to the geographical location of the origin of hu-
mankind, and there would be only one, he thought, Haeckel did not
rule out Africa. However, he strongly favoured southern Asia among
the existing continents. However, there was a third option. The
English zoologist Philip Sclater (1829e1913) had suggested the
existence of a sunken continent between Asia and Africa in 1864,
which he called Lemuria, to explain zoological resemblances be-
tween Madagascar and India. For Haeckel, Lemuria was the most
likely place for “the cradle of the human race”, which he also
referred to as “Paradise”.
73
Haeckel’s promotion of Asia served as
the direct inspiration to the Dutch physician Eugène Dubois (1858e
1940) to set out to find the Missing Link during his service as an
army doctor in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Dubois was
strengthened in his conviction by Richard Lydekker’s(1849e1915)
discovery of a fossil ape in the Siwalik Hills in 1878 in the present
day border between India and Pakistan.
74
Dubois was successful
and famously identified a femur and skullcap of what turned out to
be the discovery of Homo erectus remains found by forced labourers
on Java in 1891e92. Dubois was in no doubt. He had found
Haeckel’s Missing Link and confirmed Southeast Asia as the place of
human origins. He named it Pithecanthropus erectus, emphasising
the erect posture over speechlessness.
Not everyone agreed and Dubois’Missing Link was seen by
many as merely an ape or simply as fully human.
75
Haeckel, on the
other hand, loved it. In a lecture at the International Congress of
Zoology at the University of Cambridge in 1898 he celebrated the
discovery: “He [Pithecanthropus erectus] is, indeed, the long-
searched-for ‘missing link’, for which, in 1866, I myself had pro-
posed the hypothetical genus Pithecanthropus, species Alalus”.
Building an enlarged series of stages of human evolution Haeckel
now had large apes in orangutans and gibbons, and a fossil human
ancestor to conclude that for humans “the place of origin was
probably somewhere in Southern Asia”.
76
By the end of the century
67
Lyell (1863), p. 498.
68
Charles Lyell to George Ticknor (28 April 1864), in Lyell (1881), pp. 383e384;
George Ticknor to Charles Lyell (31 March 1863), in Ticknor (1876), vol. 2, pp. 460e
461.
69
Wallace (1889), p. 460.
70
Chambers (1844), p. 296.
71
Swainson (1834), p. 198; Chambers (1844), p. 266. For the criticism of linking
human origins in Vestiges to monkeys and orangutans see Secord (2000), pp. 319e
320.
72
Haeckel (1876), pp. 272e276 and 292e295.
73
Sclater (1864); Haeckel (1876), pp. 325e326.
74
Lydekker (1879); Theunissen (1989), p. 34; Kennedy & Ciochon (1999).
75
Bowler (1986), pp. 24e25 and 67e69; Theunissen (1989); Shipman (2002);
Kjærgaard (2012b), pp. 349e350.
76
Haeckel (1899), p. 26 and pp. 71e73.
J. van Wyhe, P.C. Kjærgaard / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 51 (2015) 53e63 61
everything was falling into place. The apes were sorted and fossils
had been found. The human-like behaviour of Jenny in London and
the fossil evidence of walking upright in Java provided two links in
the great chain of being leading to modern humans. Everything
pointed to Asia as the cradle of humankind. Lamarck, Vestiges,
Wallace and Huxley were right. The closest vertebrate ancestors of
humankind were a series of extinct primates. Honouring the pio-
neers of evolutionary thinking in the nineteenth century, Haeckel
concluded: “Looking forward to the twentieth century, I am
convinced that it will universally accept our theory of descent, and
that future science will regard it as the greatest advance made in
our time”.
77
The natural history of the generic orangutan that
eventually through Darwin, Wallace, and others placed the real
orangutan in a shared human and ape ancestral history, provided
crucial evidence furnishing a foundation for Haeckel’s hopes.
7. Conclusions
Janet Browne (1950-) has drawn attention to the great trans-
formation in descriptions of gorillas from the mid-nineteenth to the
late twentieth centuries.
78
Early accounts such as those by the
American adventurer Paul du Chaillu (1835e1903) portrayed go-
rillas as ferocious monsters, the embodiment of wild, untamed
savagery. By the 1970s when millions of television viewers saw
David Attenborough (1926-) nestled in the grass with a family of
wild mountain gorillas, the gorilla’s image had come a remarkable
full circle to gentle giant, wrongfully maligned and killed by its more
violent cousin, mankind. The image of the chimpanzees, bonobos,
and orangutans has undergone a similar transformation fromviolent
beasts to vulnerable cousins, for all the great apes not least because
of the work by the charismatic founding mothers of contemporary
primatology, Jane Goodall (1934-), Dian Fossey (1932e1985), and
Birut_
e Galdikas (1946-), also known as the Trimates.
79
Unfortunately from the perspective of comparing Darwin and
Wallace’s observations of orangutans, Darwin spent time with
tamed young adults that he could touch, interact with and exper-
iment on whereas Wallace saw only wild adults from a distance and
was only able to closely observe an infant which could not provide
the same sort of behaviour. Nevertheless the different conclusions
of Darwin and Wallace seem to derive much more from their
theoretical interests than from their contexts of observation. Dar-
win’s observations were infused by his evolutionary theory and
particularly by his interests in human evolution. And thus the clues
he derived from orangs in the 1830s found their way into his
influential evolutionary publications. Wallace too recorded simi-
larities with humans but to that point in time had made no sur-
viving notes on human origins or human evolution. Hence
Wallace’s observations were of an extraordinary animal, and not
initially about human evolution.
Wallace, despite being the younger of the two and the only one
to see them in the wild, still saw orangutans in the traditional
manner. They were the “strange creatures, which at once resemble
and mock the ‘human form divine,’dwhich so closely approach us
in structure, and yet differ so widely fromus in many points of their
external form.”
80
Despite their similarity to humans, they were still
animals, and even sometimes “monsters”. Darwin, possibly because
of his early shock with the (for him) animal-like Yahgans in Tierra
del Fuego, treated orangutans as close cousins and therefore as
good sources of evidence of human evolution.
But both men, in their different ways, were profoundly effected
by their encounters with orangutans and together they brought the
theory of evolution of natural selection into the scientific com-
munity. Human evolutionary studies received a massive leap
through Huxley’sMan’s Place in Nature and Darwin’sDescent of man
and Expression of the emotions and through Wallace’sinfluence lead
to the discovery of the first fossil hominin remains in Java.
Like many of their contemporaries, Darwin and Wallace were
ultimately trying to piece together the history of life on earth. Their
fascination with evolution, palaeontology and biogeography are all
related to the same mystery. The history of life an earth had been
very long and very complex. Many fragments of the greatest jigsaw
puzzle on earth had already been found. But the way events had
unfolded was still very far from clear. All the living species were just
the tip of the iceberg. And the solitary and durian-loving orangutan
quietly exercised a disproportionate influence on both Darwin and
Wallace and the story of our evolution that they helped reveal.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Janet Browne for helpful suggestions.
We are grateful to Kees Rookmaaker for his help with several de-
tails, the editor of this special issue for patience and dedications,
and two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments. Part of
this work was supported by an AU IDEAS grant through Centre for
Biocultural History, Aarhus University.
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