American Journal of Nasal Anatomy (1987), 17: 230-239. |
Nose-Picking in the Pongidae and Its By Dr. Thomas L. Harrison |
Introduction Nose-picking and subsequent consumption
of nasal detritus are activities that have been widely observed among
extant species of pongids, and that appear to be almost instinctive behavior
patterns in most, if not all, human groups (Barnesdale, 1975; Glicks,
1978; Bidwell and MacCown, 1979; Stevens, 1981; Marshall et. al.,
1983; and Harrison, 1986). Since it has not been recorded in the Cercopithecoidea
(James, 1982), it is suggested that it represents a behavioral adaptation
that arose some time after the hominoids diverged from the Old World monkeys
approximately 20 million years ago. |
The fossil record To begin with, the fossil record
is amply illustrative of several things. First, homo sapiens
is almost certainly derived from the general sivapithecine complex that
was widespread from 15 to 8 mya. So also are Pan, Gorilla
and Pongo. The phyletic position of the hylobatids with respect
to the sivapithecine-dryopithecine split is uncertain at this time. The
orangutan is the only definite remaining descendent of the Asian sivapithecines
that inhabited an area from the Siwaliks to China. Pan, gorilla
and homo are the likely descendents of the sivapithecines that
occupied East Africa and the Middle East and spread to North Africa and
central Europe. We share with the sivapithecines the large nasal
orbit size and distended index phalanges that so clearly differentiate
us from the small-nostrilled dryopithecines that went extinct. The
report in 1967 of the discovery of the late Miocene hominid skeleton with
the large-nosed cranium by Sir Arthur Baslington Chillingford Streebs-Watley,
and attributed by him to Dryopithecus nasalia, has since been proven
to be a hoax thus far surpassed only by Piltdown. |
Table 1
|
Species Sivapithecus indicus |
A
1.7 1.9 3.1 1.5 1.1 0.9 1.3 0.8 |
B
4.3 4.0 6.2 3.9 3.2 2.7 3.6 2.1 |
C
2.0 2.3 4.4 1.8 1.5 1.2 1.9 1.0 |
A. Dimension of Nares, anteroposteriorly, in cm. |
Secondly,
although postcranial material is sparse for many of these taxa, there is
sufficient data to confirm a relative increase in the length of the first
and second phalanges of the index finger in sivapithecines as compared to
the dryopithecines and their allies. When we compare nasal orbit size
to phalanx length, allometry being adjusted for, we find that in every case
an increase in one is matched by an increase in the other. The enlargement
of the phalanges was a trend that reached its peak in the genus Gigantopithecus,
and is reflected today in the orangutan. In the case of Gigantopithecus, the so-called "giant-nosed ape,"
it was the very size of its nose, and not just the size but its peculiarly
bulbous morphology, that was responsible for its downfall. This large-snouted
anthropoid actually attempted bipedalism, but its nasal orbit size had expanded
to such a degree that it was subject to things flying into its nose, like
the small Miocene lake birds that were as common as fleas. Every time
it tried to stand up, something would fly into its nose, and so it went
extinct. Third, the fossil record demonstrates adequately, I believe, a continuing expansion of the nasal cavity in general, and of the sphenoethmoidal recess, the pharyngeal recess, and the sphenoidal sinus in particular (see Table 2). It is clear that for the last 15 million years, our noses have been getting bigger, and we have apparently been taking full advantage of it. Were we to continue to evolve for another 15 million years, our noses would probably be as large as coffee cups. |
Table 2
|
Species Aegyptopithecus zeuxis |
A
5.3 5.9 6.7 7.5 8.4 8.2 7.9 9.2 9.5 |
B
1.1 1.5 3.2 4.1 4.7 4.4 4.2 5.6 5.9 |
C
0.4 0.8 1.5 1.9 2.4 2.2 2.2 3.2 3.6 |
D
0.3 0.6 1.1 1.6 2.0 1.8 1.7 2.9 3.2 |
A. Nasal cavity volume in cubic cm. B. Volume of sphenoethmoidal recess. C. Volume of pharyngeal recess. D. Volume of sphenoidal sinus. 1. Homo erectus before nasal cavity expansion. 2. Homo erectus after nasal cavity expansion. |
Fourth, the fossil record is quite
clear that there was a large-scale expansion of the nasal cavity about
one million years ago. In many respects, this blossoming of the
central portion of the hominid face was the last major factor that propelled
Homo erectus into truly modern morphologies and behavior patterns,
and the transformation was driven in large part by nose-picking. The
recent tabulation of the phalanx length-nasal orbit size ratio (McCully-Anderson,
1987) demonstrates conclusively the corresponding expansion of the digit,
which could only have arisen from its utilization as the first tool. |
The literature is replete with reports
of various types of nose-picking activities in several extant species
of pongids in at least two widely-separated regions of the world, subtropical
East Africa and tropical Southeast Asia. The species that have been covered
the most extensively are the western lowland and mountain gorillas, the
Bornean orangutan, and Pan troglodytes and paniscus, the
common and pygmy chimpanzee. The eastern lowland gorilla is extremely
nasty, and has not been researched much for that reason, while the Sumatran
orangutan was the subject of a ten-year project which unfortunately came
to a bad end when the Danish researcher who was studying them was overcome
with exhaustion and was unable to fight off pirates while crossing the
Sulu Sea and unhappily lost all his data overboard. |
Table 3
|
Species Dracontomelon mangiferum |
1974
90.8 94.1 84.9 89.0 92.8 93.6 92.5 |
1975
92.3 89.6 88.0 92.1 90.0 94.1 91.8 |
1976
86.5 92.6 95.2 94.9 88.7 90.5 93.6 |
1977
90.6 93.1 94.5 97.4 92.6 89.2 94.3 |
Figures are a function of 100% as a perfect correlation between food scarcity and nose-picking frequency. |
In marked contrast to the orangutan, the gorilla lives in a group environment that makes it possible to collect much more data in a shorter period of time, which is convenient for the researcher, although when there are six to eight individuals all within sight and all actively picking their noses, it is sometimes difficult to maintain one's composure. And whereas the orangutan has completely returned to the forest*, the gorilla and chimpanzee occupy varied habitats more similar to those to which the African sivapithecines adapted |
* The orangutan as has been mentioned
is almost certainly descended from the Asian sivapithecines. Cheek
tooth enamel, nasal orbit size, and a suite of shared derived characters
show this clearly. The sivapithecines were adapted to more open svannah-type
woodlands, although the Siwaliks and China retained a more laurophyllous
vegetation until the late Miocene, and so it is no surprise that middle
Pleistocene fossils of the extinct orangutan Pongo pygmaeus weidenreichi
show marked skeletal adaptations characteristic of more terrestrial locomotor
patterns, indicating that their arboreal existence is a relatively recent
development. |
Chesley Wottenham spent his entire life attempting to study gorillas. He shuttled back and forth between Zaire and Gabon every few weeks, back and forth, observing first Gorilla gorilla graueri, the eastern lowland gorilla, and then G. g. gorilla, the western lowland gorilla. He amassed a mountain of behavioral research data that was the envy of every worker in the field, despite the general nastiness of the eastern sub-species. The trouble was that bus service was very bad between Zaire and Gabon. The roads were not good, and neither were the facilities for obtaining drinking water, or for eating a meal, or for staying the night, or for buying groceries, or pharmaceuticals, or clothing, or lamp fuel, or reading and writing materials. Twenty years of that was all he could take and then he died. (See Table 4 for a breakdown of his various activities.) |
Table 4
|
Activity (% of time spent) |
1915-
1920 7.5 20.2 62.3 10.0 |
1920-
1925 7.0 24.3 58.7 10.0 |
1925-
1930 7.9 22.8 59.3 10.0 |
1930-
1935 5.3 10.1 70.6 14.0 |
Oxford University,
for which he had been conducting the research as a doctoral thesis, unfortunately
rejected his work and said that he had been a dyslexic and that for all
those years he had been confused about east and west, thereby hopelessly
muddying his data. Still, his conclusions were interesting, but we
don't have time to go into that here. The question of resource variability and its effect on pongid nose-picking was one that had fascinated Dr. Patricia Emory ever since she was a child. Sponsored by the L.S.B. Leakey Foundation, she set off for Rwanda in 1980 to see for herself just what the noses of mountain gorillas were really like. Having studied nasal structure at Princeton, she received her doctorate in paleonasology at the Charles DeGaulle Institute of the Sarbonne. Like Bidwell and MacCown in Southeast Asia, she was scrupulous in recording the seasonal fruiting and flowering of each of the two dozen or so food species most utilized by the mountain gorillas. Recognizing that gorillas are basically foliverous, she also recorded twelve of the non-fruit species favored by them, and Table 5 is a compilation of their nine most utilized food sources, tabulated similarly to Table 3. |
Table 5
|
Hagenia abyssinica |
1981 95.8 |
1982 96.2 |
1983 92.9 |
Figures are a function of 100% as a perfect correlation between food scarcity and nose-picking frequency. |
|
Table 6
|
Feeding |
Jan/Feb 32.1 |
Mar/Apr 30.1 |
May/Jun 34.6 |
Jul/Aug 30.6 |
Sep/Oct 32.3 |
Nov/Dec 31.5 |
Although he did not specifically correlate nose-picking with resource variation, Barnesdale concluded that the activity did serve a necessary purpose, and had been or still was adaptively advantageous. In one of his last letters before being arrested, he pointed out with a great deal of satisfaction, I believe, that Tanzanian chimpanzees spent more time picking their noses than did their Ugandan counterparts, and that group size at Gombe was invariably larger. Behavior studies of extant pongids over the past fifteen or so years, in addition to those from the earlier part of the 20th century, all agree on two things: great apes pick their noses, and when food resource species decline for any reason, nose-picking frequency increases. The enlarged nostril volume and lengthened phalanges of Pongo, Pan, and to a lesser extent, Gorilla, are obvious morphological adaptations for nose-picking. It seems clear that the pongids share with Homo the sivapithecine legacy of picking the nose, and thus when our mothers tell us not to pick our noses, they are denying the logic and rationale of evolutionary biology. Whether or not the current identification of the KRU-234 fossil from Kenya as Australopithecus nostrilis holds up, the questions remaining to be answered are fascinating ones, and deserving of further study. Regretfully, this researcher must leave these questions to others. |
Acknowledgements I gratefully acknowledge the unstinting support of the Primate Behavior Research Group at Harvard University, the L.S.B. Leakey Foundation, the Ugandan Natural Parks Directorship, the National Wildlife Council of Gabon, Professors Arthur Barber, John Phillip Grant, Maxine Underhill, Lewis Keirfallow and Umbley Nottingham at the Columbia Nasal Research Institute, and the Ford Foundation. I am indebted to my many colleagues in the fields of primatology and nasal morphology who consented to read this paper and make suggestions. Additional funding was provided by the Royal Nasal Society of London, the Gorgonzola Monkey Club, and the Association Against the Use of Pongids for Experimental Testing. |
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© M. Charters, Sierra Madre, CA. |