Now the tail was lost.
In the Miocene's
Warm forests, from Catarrhinos' line,
A branch gave up the monkey's means
Of the tail's balance and the feline
Flexibility of the small body—
And grew larger, broader, the shoulders
Rotating freely, the embody-
Ment of a different climbing: the boulders
And the vertical trunks of the great trees
Were scaled not by running along the branch
But by hanging beneath it—the expertise
Of brachiation, the avalanche
Of arm-over-arm locomotion
Through the canopy's underside,
The ape swinging with the ocean's
Fluidity, the arms spread wide
And the body pendular between them.
Proconsulos—the dawn ape—was first:
A Miocene African between them
And the monkeys, the rehearsed
And transitional form that still had a tail
But whose shoulder was already free
To rotate, whose body told the tale
Of the ape's beginning—the decree
Of a new way to be primate.
Hylobatos—the gibbon—perfected the art
Of the swing: the lesser ape, intimate
With the canopy's geometry, the heart
Of the brachiator's world—the gibbon moved
Through the treetops faster than a man can run
On the ground, the long arms grooved
Into the rhythm of the pendulum's stun
Of momentum—each swing precisely
Timed, each grab of the next branch
Calculated in the brain's concisely
Mapped three-dimensional avalanche
Of spatial awareness—and the gibbon sang.
The gibbon's song—the duet of the pair,
Male and female, the morning's rang
And territorial anthem through the air
Of the Asian forest—was the most complex
Vocal performance of any non-human
Primate: not the howler's flexed
And bellowing bass but the acumen
Of a structured, melodic, thirty-minute
Concert that the mated pair
Performed together—the intimate
And coordinated affair
Of two voices weaving together
In the forest dawn.
But it was the great apes
Who would change the story altogether.
Pongos—the orangutan—the escapes
Of the Asian forest's solitary sage:
The red-haired philosopher of Borneo
And Sumatra, whose cognitive age
Exceeded every monkey's—the scenario
Of the orangutan's intelligence was this:
The solitary life in the complex forest
Required a mental map of the abyss
Of fruit-tree locations—the forest's poorest
And most scattered diet demanded
That the orangutan remember the location,
The fruiting schedule, and the commanded
Route between a thousand trees—a station
Of memory and planning that no monkey's
Social brain could match in its solitary
Equivalent—the orangutan's chunky
And deliberate cognition, the solitary
Genius of the forest's deepest puzzle.
And in Africa: Dryopithos—the tree ape—
The ancestor of the muzzle
And the hand and the brain whose shape
Would become the gorilla's, the chimpanzee's,
And at last the human's—the African
Great apes whose Miocene expertise
In the forest canopy of the pelican-
Rich Rift Valley lake margins
Would produce the largest
And most intelligent of the margins'
Living architects—the largest
Brains in proportion to body
That the primate line had yet achieved.
And they used tools—the first body
Of evidence that a non-human conceived
Of the world as material to be shaped:
The chimpanzee ancestor who picked up
A stone, a stick, who draped
A leaf for water like a cup—
The first deliberate manipulation
Of the object-world for a purpose
Beyond the immediate sensation:
The primate's hand becoming the surface
Of intentional design.
Honor the apes—the tailless ones
Who swung and thought and sang, the line
Between the monkey's million suns
And the human's singular ambition—
The brachiators, the tool-users, the singers,
The patient ones whose long cognition
Was the preface to the fingers
That would one day write, and the voice
That would one day speak, and the brain
That would one day make the conscious choice
To ask: from what beginning came this chain?