(These quotes are taken from Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors)

(Pages 268-269)

The ancient Mayan authors of the Popol Vuh considered monkeys to be the product of the last botched experiment conducted by the gods before they finally got it right and managed to create us. The gods meant well, but they were fallible, imperfect artisans. Humans are hard to make. Many peoples in Africa, Central and South America, and the Indian subcontinent thought of apes and monkeys as beings with some deep connection to humans -aspirant humans, perhaps, or failed humans, demoted for some grave transgression against divine law, or voluntary exiles from the self-discipline demanded by civilization.

In ancient Greece and Rome the similarity of apes or monkeys with humans was well-known -indeed, it was stressed by Aristotle and Galen. But this led to no speculations about common ancestry. The gods who had made humans were also in the habit of changing themselves into animals to rape or seduce young women: Like the centaurs and the Minotaur, the offspring of these unions were chimeras, part beast, part human. Still, no ape chimeras are prominent in the myths of Greece and Rome.

In India and ancient Egypt, though, there were monkey-headed gods, and in the latter large numbers of mummified baboons -indicating that they were cherished if not worshipped. A monkey apotheosis would have been unthinkable in the post-classical West -in part because the Judaeo-Christian-lslamic religion came of age where nonhuman primates were rare or absent, but mainly because the worship of animals (for example, the Golden Calf of the Israelites) was singled out as an abomination: They were pedaling away from animism as fast as they could. Apes were not widely available for examination in Europe until about the sixteenth century; the so-called Barbary ape of North Africa and Gibraltar -which is what Aristotle and Galen apparently described -is actually a monkey, a macaque.

Without exposure to the beasts most like men, it was difficult to draw the connection between beasts and men. It was easier by far to imagine a separate creation of each species, with the less vivid similarities between us and other animals (the suckling of the young, say, or five toes on each foot) understood as some trademark idiosyncracy of the Creator. The ape was as far below man, it was asserted, as man was below God. So, when, after the Crusades, and especially beginning in the seventeenth century, the West came to know monkeys and apes better, it was with a sense of embarrassment, shame, a nervous snigger -perhaps to disguise the shock of recognition at the family resemblance.

The Darwinian idea that monkeys and apes are our closest relatives brought the discomfort to the conscious level. You can still see the unease today in the conventional associations with the word "ape": to cope slavishly, to be outsized and brutal. To "go ape" is to revert, to become wild, untamed. While we handle something idly, in an exploratory way, we're ''monkeying around.'' To "make a monkey" out of someone is to humiliate him. A "little monkey'' is a mischievous or playful child. A ''monkeyshine'' is a prank. To "go bananas" is to lose control -reflecting the fact that monkeys and apes, who indeed love bananas, are not subject to the same social restraints that we are. In Christian Europe in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, monkeys and apes were emblematic of extreme ugliness, of a doomed craving for the status of humans, of ill-gotten wealth, of a vengeful disposition, of lust and foolishness and sloth. They were accessories -because of their susceptibility to temptation- in the "Fall of Man." For their sins, it was widely held, apes and monkey deserved to be subjugated by humans. We seem to have weighed these beings down with a heavy burden of symbols, metaphors, allegories, and projections of our own fears about ourselves....