Open Access
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 great ape 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.
Keywords
- Orangutans;
- Great apes;
- Human evolution;
- Charles Darwin;
- Alfred Russel Wallace;
- Anthropology
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 forward 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
diversity and was there anything bridging the differences? Was it
variation or separation? Looking for answers scholars systematically
began historicizing 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 provided 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, primates—and in particular the great
apes—played a central role. There were many questions as it was not
clear who they were and how the relationship to humans should be
interpreted.
Charles
Darwin (1809–1882) and Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) 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 subspecies (Pongo abelii and Pongo pygmaeus) and our closest living relatives after chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), bonobos (Pan paniscus) and gorillas (Gorilla beringei and Gorilla gorilla). 2
The geologist Charles Lyell (1797–1875) 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 rest of the
animal kingdom. To go the whole orang then, meant not just to treat
humans scientifically 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 boundary 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.
