# What did folks think about apes before Darwin? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [July 11, 2016, 12:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-folks-think-about-apes-before-darwin/759616 "2016-07-11T00:27:09Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Leo\_Bloom](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leo_bloom/32/10377_2.png) [@Leo\_Bloom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leo_Bloom)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2016, 3:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-folks-think-about-apes-before-darwin/759616/21 "2016-07-12T15:50:31Z")
> [@md2000](#): > > …therefore we are are just animals that were once non-sentient. > > The religious concept of souls is challenged by the question - at what point under this theory would a man have a soul? Did a soulless mother give birth to a man with a soul? Would Christ have died to “redeem” this person but not his mother? > > It’s pretty easy to see why this sort of question must have driven the religious people to anger and denial over the theory, just as abortion seems to in our day. > [@Blake](#): > > … > What the hell does \*any \*of of that have to do with the topic of this thread? The question was whether people pre-Darwin acknowledged the close relationship between apes and humans. As has been shown in multiple posts, they certainly did. That is completely contradictory to your claim that people didn’t care about the resemblances. > > Your last post just seems to just be an an attempt to witness in GQ. I can’t see how it has any bearing _at all_ on the question. Your vehemence is startling and counterproductive to the history of ideas. You say the "question was whether people … acknowledged … " something or other. Many people, to put it mildly, “care,” as you say, about these issues, far more of how “cared” in the ways suggested by ideas of “soul” and “Christ” at the time of those apparently GQ-appropriate cites you approve of, and for whom, scientists, intellectuals, and thread participants as focused as you, were not and could not be as quick to dispense with how people actually conceive the world as you seem to be. Even Darwin. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2016, 4:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-folks-think-about-apes-before-darwin/759616/22 "2016-07-12T16:23:20Z")
> [@Omar\_Little](#): > > In the 1700’s who many people in the world had ever seen an ape? I would expect that the % is very small. Live chimpanzees began to be sent to Europe in 1640, but they would have been rare in captivity or as specimens. Orangutans also became known to Europeans in the 1600s, and were scientifically described by the mid 1700s. Both were included in Linnaeus’s works. Gorillas did not become known to science until the mid-1800s. As has been mentioned, bonobos weren’t recognized as a separate species from chimps until the 1900s. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2016, 4:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-folks-think-about-apes-before-darwin/759616/23 "2016-07-12T16:32:21Z")
Since apes weren’t distinguished from monkeys in the 1700s then a lot of people would have opinions formed based on their exposure to monkeys which weren’t that rare outside of their habitat and quite abundant within it. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2016, 8:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-folks-think-about-apes-before-darwin/759616/24 "2016-07-12T20:36:24Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > In 1838 Pierre Boitard depicted [“fossil man”](http://www.strangescience.net/pics/boitardfm.jpg) as being very apelike. This is well before the first fossil humans were actually discovered. That’s plain to see. The picture looks like a donkey’s head set atop an ordinary but gracile _H. sapiens_ body. > [@](#): > > Here’s [another image](http://www.trussel.com/prehist/covers/boitard1.jpg) by Boitard in 1861, ten years before Darwin published _The Descent of Man._ That picture is much more like _Australopithecus_ compared to the earlier one. Anatomically, it seems they were beginning to get the idea, since by then the Neander Valley had yielded morphologically older human fossils. ---
**Author:** ![Go\_Arachnid\_Laser\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/b2d939/32.png) [@Go\_Arachnid\_Laser\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Go_Arachnid_Laser_1)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2016, 8:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-folks-think-about-apes-before-darwin/759616/25 "2016-07-12T20:43:07Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > It is interesting, although off-topic, to note that in several common west European languages that I have inquired about (German, French, Italian, **Spanish** ) there is no separate word for ape and monkey. My English to French dictionary under “ape” says “grande singe sans queue” or “big tailless monkey”. Sure we do. “Simio” for the ones without a tail, “Mono” for the ones with a tail. Well, most people just use “mono” for everything, but that’s not the point. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2016, 9:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-folks-think-about-apes-before-darwin/759616/26 "2016-07-12T21:01:37Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > “Monkey” is first used around 1530, and is apparently related to the Spanish _mono_. From Spanish mon(o)- + the Flemish diminutive -ke. The Spanish word originated as a clipped form of Arabic مَيْمون _maymūn_, which literally means ‘fortunate’ (derived from the root y-m-n like the word يُمْن _yumn_ ‘good fortune, auspiciousness’). Why “fortunate”? Because, contrarily, monkeys were regarded as unlucky, so they called them the opposite for apotropaic (warding off evil) reasons. To this day the Turkish word for monkey is also _maymun_. The actual Arabic word covering the meaning of both monkey and ape is _qird_. Another Arabic epithet for ape is سَعْدان _sa‘dān_ (the happy one), from the root of sa‘d ‘happiness’, similar to the use of “maymun.” Yeah, I know it looks funny to gloss “sa‘d” as “happiness,” but there it is. For that matter, the Turkish word for happy is “şad,” but derived from Persian شاد _shād_ with no relation to the Arabic. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2016, 10:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-folks-think-about-apes-before-darwin/759616/27 "2016-07-12T22:13:58Z")
> [@Omar\_Little](#): > > In the 1700’s who many people in the world had ever seen an ape? I would expect that the % is very small. You don’t think Africans are people? Had you said Europeans, I would agree. Also Asians and Native Americans. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2016, 10:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-folks-think-about-apes-before-darwin/759616/28 "2016-07-12T22:19:01Z")
> [@Go\_Arachnid\_Laser](#): > > Sure we do. “Simio” for the ones without a tail, “Mono” for the ones with a tail. > > Well, most people just use “mono” for everything, but that’s not the point. I can’t argue but I got that from a native Spanish speaker. She’s Argentinian, if that matters. But I didn’t just toss it off. And I asked native speakers of the other languages I mentioned. I didn’t realize how recently that distinction was made in English. Thanks, Colibri. ---
**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2016, 12:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-folks-think-about-apes-before-darwin/759616/29 "2016-07-13T00:15:50Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > … > Your last post just seems to just be an an attempt to witness in GQ. I can’t see how it has any bearing _at all_ on the question. Considering I’m an atheist, I guess that means people read into things what they want to see. The logic about evolution and souls is (I think) from James Blish’s “A Case of Conscience” (it’s been decades since I read it) and numerous other discussions I’ve seen about why (some) religions are hostile to evolution. If a soul is a manifestation of something inherently human, the mind and awareness, then does that mean a person born no brain does not have one, is therefore not human? Where does a soul come from? You can follow that logic down the rabbit hole to see that there are some serious questions if humans came from non-humans. We won’t even get into “do aliens have souls? Does original sin apply to aliens? How can they be saved if they didn’t know about Jesus?” > **[Aliens and Jesuits: James Blish's A Case of Conscience - Reactor](https://reactormag.com/aliens-and-jesuits-james-blishs-a-case-of-conscience/)** > > James Blish’s A Case of Conscience  is a very peculiar book indeed. I first read it years ago as part of the After Such Knowledge series. The other books in the series are explicitly fantasy or horror, this is science fiction set in a universe... Fortunately, I don’t have any religious beliefs and those questions just seem like angels-on-pinheads or vice versa details to me. To get back to the OP - of course people noticed similarities. They were not all stupid. The OP point would be, what did they think about those similarities before the theory was current that similarity did not mean “looks a bit like” but rather “common ancestor”? Even today when millions, billions, and trillions are tossed about in the news, people have trouble grasping what an incredible timeline evolution works through. A 10 million years of evolution means half a million generations or more… could most people even understand that number in the 1800’s? There were a lot of comments that seem to have been tossed about back then to the effect “Darwin’s grandfather may have been a monkey but mine weren’t.” > [@](#): > > As he closed his remarks, Wilberforce turned to Huxley and sneeringly asked him if it was through his grandfather or grandmother that he claimed descent from apes ---
**Author:** ![Jragon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19b73/32.png) [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2016, 2:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-folks-think-about-apes-before-darwin/759616/30 "2016-07-13T02:06:00Z")
> [@Chihuahua](#): > > Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, for example, thought that species changed by physical deformation. For example: A giraffe stretched his neck by reaching for leaves, and then his progeny would be born with longer necks. This is incorrect for the same reason that a person who pierces their ears does not give birth to a baby with pierced ears. I can’t recall where I read it, but haven’t we found that, in certain narrow esoteric circumstances, something similar to Lamarckian evolution can rarely happen? I think it may have been endocrine rather than genetics related (or at least related to the expression of genes rather than the genes themselves per se), but I heard there are tiny strange ways in which animals needing to use certain “dormant” features a distant or not-so-distant ancestor had (due to, e.g., a change in climate) can result in those old genes “turning on” and being expressed in their offspring. ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2016, 6:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-folks-think-about-apes-before-darwin/759616/31 "2016-07-13T06:59:42Z")
> [@md2000](#): > > Considering I’m an atheist, I guess that means people read into things what they want to see. “Witnessing” is used on these boards to describe any gratuitous testimony for one’s personal beliefs of any sort, not just religious ones. I think it was pretty clear to everybody that you (like me) are an atheist. ---
**Author:** ![Bridget\_Burke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7cd45c/32.png) [@Bridget\_Burke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bridget_Burke)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2016, 7:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-folks-think-about-apes-before-darwin/759616/32 "2016-07-13T07:57:26Z")
This passage seem relevant. > [@](#): > > Winthrop D. Jordan, in his classic study of early British and American racism, _White Over Black_, makes the important point that the English discovery of the chimpanzee (then called “orang-outang”) coincided in time with northern Europe’s involvement with the African slave trade and first significant encounter with sub-Saharan West Africans, some of whom came from roughly the same region as the chimpanzees. At a time when many educated people were moving away from (or had never been exposed to) biblical literalism, there was widespread astonishment that animals like chimpanzees could be so intelligent and communicative. Consequently, beginning in the late 1600s, there was much pre-Darwinian speculation on the relationship between Africans and apes (this was anticipated, as we have seen, in some medieval Islamic literature). > > As matters developed, there were many precedents, in the century before he wrote, for Thomas Jefferson’s notorious lines, in his _Notes on the State of Virginia_, about blacks themselves preferring whites, “as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black woman over those of his own species.” One must always balance this appalling claim that black women had sexual relations with orang-outangs (chimpanzees) with Jefferson’s contradictory reassurance that blacks were equal to whites in their innate “moral sense,” even if they were inferior to whites “in the endowments both of body and mind” and were more crudely “ardent after their female.” David Brion Davis. _Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World_ (The more I learn about TJ, the less I like him.) ---
**Author:** ![Staggerlee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/staggerlee/32/3134_2.png) [@Staggerlee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Staggerlee)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2016, 11:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-folks-think-about-apes-before-darwin/759616/33 "2016-07-13T11:25:15Z")
> [@Jragon](#): > > I can’t recall where I read it, but haven’t we found that, in certain narrow esoteric circumstances, something similar to Lamarckian evolution can rarely happen? I think it may have been endocrine rather than genetics related (or at least related to the expression of genes rather than the genes themselves per se), but I heard there are tiny strange ways in which animals needing to use certain “dormant” features a distant or not-so-distant ancestor had (due to, e.g., a change in climate) can result in those old genes “turning on” and being expressed in their offspring. I think that’ll be ‘Epigenetics’ you’re thinking of - [Epigenetics - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics) . I haven’t read much about it, but assume it doesn’t completely overturn the importance of natural selection in evolution. That would be annoying. ---
**Author:** ![Leo\_Bloom](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leo_bloom/32/10377_2.png) [@Leo\_Bloom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leo_Bloom)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2016, 1:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-folks-think-about-apes-before-darwin/759616/34 "2016-07-13T13:04:43Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > “Witnessing” is used on these boards to describe any gratuitous testimony for one’s personal beliefs of any sort, not just religious ones. I think it was pretty clear to everybody that you (like me) are an atheist. Including atheistic witnessing, it seems to me; I am not saying you have excluded that, however. Although it would be one of the more profound topics for ATMB, this forum would be an important discussion point, and I think I may be allowed the following comment. Despite what is so often the (self) examined or unexamined assumptions of some posters in GQ on scientific issues, statements of fact, in the hands of some are statements of secular apologetics, often as heartfelt, and unfortunately vituperative, as the most classically religious apologetics. When gathered as such explicitly and “applied,” so to speak, to a lesser degree (“that doesn’t belong in GQ”) or greater one (“this sounds like it’s coming from someone who believes in Christian nonsense”) these sentiments are often non-sequiturs. Non-goofy non-hijack non-sequiturs are usually pounced on here, rightly so…but not for outright secular apologetics and witnessing. ---
**Author:** ![Leo\_Bloom](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leo_bloom/32/10377_2.png) [@Leo\_Bloom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leo_Bloom)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2016, 1:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-folks-think-about-apes-before-darwin/759616/35 "2016-07-13T13:19:41Z")
> [@Staggerlee](#): > > … it doesn’t completely overturn the importance of natural selection in evolution. That would be annoying. 🙂 “Being annoyed” is almost a definition of how scientists deal with new empirical and experimental results. Physicists were _hugely_ annoyed recently when it seemed there was evidence of a faster-than-light particle. In fact, they must walk around constantly annoyed about dark matter, dark energy, and all sorts of stuff. Meaning it’s always a bad time to borrow money from them. What annoys evolutionary scientists the most? Ah…[List of unsolved problems in biology - Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_biology) ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2016, 11:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-folks-think-about-apes-before-darwin/759616/36 "2016-07-13T23:24:17Z")
Oddly enough, there’s very little difference between a scientist being annoyed, excited, and elated. We _like_ problems that annoy us. ---
**Author:** ![Filbert](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/filbert/32/3433_2.png) [@Filbert](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Filbert)\ **Post date:** [July 14, 2016, 5:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-folks-think-about-apes-before-darwin/759616/37 "2016-07-14T17:20:28Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > You don’t think Africans are people? Had you said Europeans, I would agree. Also Asians and Native Americans. None of the non-human ape species are very common or widely distributed. Sure, the range has probably decreased a lot since the 1700s, but even then when the ape population was higher, I’d suspect the majority of Africans had never seen a live chimpanzee or gorilla. They don’t share habitat with humans very easily. ---
**Author:** ![GreenWyvern](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/greenwyvern/32/2834_2.png) [@GreenWyvern](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreenWyvern)\ **Post date:** [July 14, 2016, 6:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-folks-think-about-apes-before-darwin/759616/38 "2016-07-14T18:08:06Z")
Nobody seems to have mentioned Lord Monboddo (1714-1799), a Scottish judge. > **[James Burnett, Lord Monboddo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Burnett,_Lord_Monboddo)** > > James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (baptised 25 October 1714; died 26 May 1799) was a Scottish judge, scholar of linguistic evolution, philosopher and deist. He is most famous today as a founder of modern comparative historical linguistics. In 1767 he became a judge in the Court of Session. > As such, Burnett adopted an honorary title based on the name of his father's estate and family seat, Monboddo House. Monboddo was one of a number of scholars involved at the time in development of early concepts... Long before Darwin, he strongly put forward the theory that men, apes and monkeys were related. He suggested that early humans might have had tails. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [July 14, 2016, 7:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-folks-think-about-apes-before-darwin/759616/39 "2016-07-14T19:02:45Z")
> [@Bridget\_Burke](#): > > (The more I learn about TJ, the less I like him.) Jefferson’s quote doesn’t indicate that black women _willingly_ had sex with apes. In fact, among orangutans many matings are by rape by young males. According to legend, male apes would try to mate with human females by force. (_King King_ is a modern variation of this legend.) Saying male apes were attracted to human females doesn’t cast aspersions on the women. ---
**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\ **Post date:** [July 14, 2016, 10:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-folks-think-about-apes-before-darwin/759616/40 "2016-07-14T22:09:30Z")
Interesting - but Lord Monboddo’s views were very advanced and non-mainstream, according to the link. Evolution (and selection) can be inferred from animal breeding - but even species like dogs or horses, you have to wonder how much divergne was visible over a lifetime and whether accurate enough records were kept to track serious “evolution”. Dogs have a huge number of varied breeds- did anyone remark how the changes had been forced, or did hundreds of years of selection mean nobody noticed? As I keep saying is - the problem wasn’t that apes looked like humans. Lots of animals and plants looked like other ones. Cats and dogs had 4 paws and a tail, and nobody considered then “related”. The thing about evolution that created the controversy was telling people they were “descended from monkeys”. Then of course, some religions take the Bible as literal truth, meaning that anything that disagrees with doctrine is incorrect. I don’t think I was pushing any point of view and I have no idea how that would even be apparent - I was just explaining why some religions have a problem with evolution. By contrast, a religion without a doctrinal creation story or one which considers every animal has a “soul” or could be a human’s re-incarnation probably does not have a problem with the theory. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-folks-think-about-apes-before-darwin/759616.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-did-folks-think-about-apes-before-darwin/759616.md?page=3)