That seems to be because females tend to have similar tastes in a mate – the male at the top of the male hierarchy. This might be expected to spread paternity rather evenly amongst the males, especially as females make close friendships with different males.īut if anything, the skew is even greater in bonobos than in chimps. Free from the threat of aggression, they can mate with whoever they like. In chimpanzee society, males are dominant to females and often bully them into mating.Īmong bonobos, though, it is the females that are socially dominant. Research in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has revealed that a few privileged males father a large proportion of all the offspring born in their community. Even so, some bonobos are more equal than others. “But we have more similarities with our great ape cousins than we previously thought, in terms of our prosocial predispositions.”īonobos are famous for their gentle, free-loving, egalitarian ways.

“Human cooperative behaviour is still much more flexible, more risky, more complicated and at a larger scale,” Tan told BBC Wildlife. You want to be nice to someone who’s going to be important for you. “But you may meet them again, and this individual could become your future friend or ally.

“All relationships start between two strangers,” says Tan. Tan says that they behave so aggressively to strangers that it’s not even possible to perform these experiments on them.īonobos seem to play a longer game, which involves making a good first impression. Such “prosocial” behaviour sits well with the image of bonobos as peace-loving egalitarians. “In return they had no immediate selfish benefits.” “They gave up playing-time, walked across the room, climbed up, held their body with one arm and reached through narrow mesh to help with the other arm,” says Jingzhi Tan of Duke University, USA. Bonobos in the second room would make considerable efforts to release the food for an unfamiliar individual in the first room. The researchers hung a piece of fruit from a rope in one room that could only be released from an adjacent room, separated by a fence. But their closest cousins, bonobos, are more like us, according to new research.Įxperiments conducted at Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of the Congo show that bonobos are willing to put themselves out to help strangers gain access to food even though they get none of it for themselves. Chimps rarely tolerate the presence of strangers, let alone go out of their way for them. Humans are usually only too happy to help – even complete strangers, and even to our own inconvenience. Unlike chimpanzees, bonobos are “prosocial” – they will help a complete stranger in need. It is one of only two species in the genus Pan, the other being the chimpanzee ( P. The scientific name of the bonobo is Pan paniscus. Web exclusive: Bonobos cause issues for the crew - Monkey Planet - BBC One What’s the scientific name of the bonobo? Groups are generally led by an alpha female, females almost always have a higher social standing than males, and males derive their status from that of their mother.īonobos are also much more sexual, using ‘sexual contact’ to greet friends, de-escalate conflicts and cement relationships. Rather than having a strict male hierarchy like chimps, they are a matriarchal society: the girls very much rule the bonobo world. However, it is in their social systems that you really see divergence. You are also more likely to see them walking on two legs. To the trained eye, bonobos are more graceful and slender, with differently shaped and coloured faces. In fact, bonobos were once thought to be merely smaller versions, and called pygmy chimpanzees. Chimpanzees and bonobos share approximately 99.6% of their DNA and can be hard to tell apart.

Visually and genetically there isn’t much between the two great apes. What is the difference between a chimp and a bonobo? Quiz: How good is your primate knowledge?.Is it legal to keep primates as pets in the UK?.

Bonobo chimps