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| All photos: Frans de Waal, courtesy Living Links Center |
Everyone is familiar with the comparisons between humans and our "closest cousins" – chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. But has anyone ever heard of bonobos? If not, don't feel left out. Even one of the top bonobo researchers in the world says that in the minds of most people, bonobos don't really exist. But the wilds of the Congo region of Africa suggest otherwise. Estimates suggest between 5,000 and 25,000 of the peaceful primates live there.
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| Congo is the only place the bonobos call home |
But in the last five years, the knowledge about bonobos is not only raising a few eyebrows – as you'll find out later – it's starting to throw a curve ball at the commonly-held notions that humans evolved from an ancestor that has more in common with the chimpanzee than anything else.
Dr. Frans de Waal, director of the Living Links program at the Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta and author of "Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape", is one researcher who is looking into the human-like behaviour of the little-known primates. "I would say that it's a species as close to us as the chimpanzee that's been very much ignored," he states. The reason why no one knows much about them is somewhat convoluted.
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| Bonobos are generally quite peaceful |
"Studies on bonobos started much later than on the other ape species and fewer people were involved in them," de Waal points out. "So as a result, we knew less about them. The chimpanzee has been known for centuries, but the bonobo has been set apart from the chimpanzee only since the 1930s." Add to that the fact that their remote habitat in a politically unstable part of Africa makes it doubly difficult to study them in the field. But there's no denying that a number of things have surfaced recently that makes them much more than a passing curiosity.
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| Bonobos standing upright bare a striking resemblance to humans |
While they may appear chimpanzee-like to the untrained eye, bonobos are different. "In terms of body mass, they are very similar to chimpanzees," de Waal explains. "But they're much more gracile. They have longer legs, they're slender, they don't have the huge shoulders and thick neck [of chimps], and they have a smaller head. They're also more elegantly built and move more elegantly than chimps. And when the bonobos stand upright, they look very human-like because they have these different body proportions." It's their social behaviour, however, that's the real pièce de résistance. "In terms of social behaviour, bonobos are almost the opposite of the chimpanzee in that they're relatively peaceful," de Waal remarks. "As far as we know, they don't have inter-group warfare going on, they eat a little bit of meat but much less than chimpanzees, and they're not great hunters." But here's where it gets interesting: "Male dominance is not there. It's rather the opposite where females dominate the show." And it doesn't stop there!
 "They seem to resolve a lot of their conflicts with sexual behaviour," he says. "If two bonobos have a fight, they may make up with a sexual reconciliation, which is typical for their species. So there's a lot of sexual activity that goes on that has more social meaning than reproductive meaning." Their sexuality also mirrors humans in a couple of other ways, too.
"Bonobos have a greater variety of sexual postures," he reveals. "The bonobos can do it any way they want – and they can do it face to face also. So positionally – so to speak – they have a richer repertoire. And their sexual behaviour is not just male to female. It's also female-to-female and male-to-male and male-to-juvenile." In fact, they make the human sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies look tame. But what does this all mean for theories of human evolution? "The bonobo is almost a complete contrast to the chimpanzee, even though the two species are so closely related," de Waal explains. "So there's no reason, from the biological perspective, to suggest that the chimps are a more important model than the bonobo, because they're equidistant to us."
 As de Waal suggests, "it's possible that the common ancestor was not exactly like the chimpanzee, but it may have been something in between a chimp and a bonobo. That means maybe there was aggression and male dominance [as some theories suggest], but it's very well possible there were maybe lots of other tendencies that have not been emphasised so much in models of human evolution." …like the propensity for pleasureful sexual activity, for instance!
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