Genetically, the chimps and bonobos at the zoo are far closer to you and the other paying customers than they are to the gorillas, orangutans, monkeys, or anything else in a cage. Our DNA differs from that of chimps and bonobos by roughly 1.6 percent, making us closer to them than a dog is to a fox, a white-handed gibbon to a white-cheeked crested gibbon, an Indian elephant to an African elephant or, for any bird-watchers who may be tuning in, a red-eyed vireo to a white-eyed vireo.Read more at location 1092
The ancestral line leading to chimps and bonobos splits off from that leading to humans just five to six million years agoRead more at location 1096
with the chimp and bonobo lines separating somewhere between 3 million and 860,000 years ago.Read more at location 1098
gorilla peeled away from the common line around nine million years ago, orangutans 16 million, and gibbons, the only monogamous ape, took an early exit about 22 million years ago.Read more at location 1099
Homo sapiens sapiens: New York, New York. Chimps and bonobos are practically neighbors, living within thirty miles of each other in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Yorktown Heights, New York. Both just fifty miles from New York, they are well within commuting distance of humanity. Gorillas are enjoying cheese-steaks in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Orangutans are in Baltimore, Maryland, doing whatever it is people do in Baltimore. Gibbons are busily legislating monogamy in Washington, D.C. Old-world monkeys (baboons, macaques) are down around Roanoke, Virginia.Read more at location 1103
For bonobos, a turbocharged sexuality utterly divorced from reproduction is a central feature of social interaction and group cohesion.Read more at location 1116
The payoff is “a more intense form of social cooperation between males and females” leading to “a more intensely cooperative social group, a more secure milieu for rearing infants, and hence a higher degree of reproductive success for sexier males and females.”3 The bonobo’s promiscuity, in other words, confers significant evolutionary benefits on the apes.Read more at location 1118
The only monogamous ape, the gibbon, lives in Southeast Asia in small family units consisting of a male/female couple and their young—isolated in a territory of thirty to fifty square kilometers.Read more at location 1122
Monogamy is not found in any social, group-living primate except—if the standard narrative is to be believed—us.Read more at location 1124
If Thomas Hobbes had been offered the opportunity to design an animal that embodied his darkest convictions about human nature, he might have come up with something like a chimpanzee.Read more at location 1130
Chimps are reported to be power-mad, jealous, quick to violence, devious, and aggressive. Murder, organized warfare between groups, rape, and infanticide are prominent in accounts of their behavior.Read more at location 1132
Chimpanzee-like violence preceded and paved the way for human war, making modern humans the dazed survivors of a continuous, 5-million-year habit of lethal aggression.”Read more at location 1136
The baboon model was abandoned when it became clear that they lack some fundamental human characteristics: cooperative hunting, tool use, organized warfare, and power struggles involving complex coalition-building. Meanwhile, Jane Goodall and others were observing these qualities in chimpanzee behavior. Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky—an expert on baboon behavior—notes that “chimps are what baboons would love to be like if they had a shred of self-discipline.”Read more at location 1140
Bonobo Egalitarian and peaceful, bonobo communities are maintained primarily through social bonding between females, although females bond with males as well. Male status derives from the mother. Bonds between son and mother are lifelong. Multimale-multifemale mating.Read more at location 1150
Chimpanzee The bonds between males are strongest and lead to constantly shifting male coalitions. Females move through overlapping ranges within territory patrolled by males, but don’t form strong bonds with other females or any particular male. Multimale-multifemale mating.Read more at location 1153
Human By far the most diverse social species among the primates, there is plentiful evidence of all types of socio-sexual bonding, cooperation, and competition among contemporary humans. Multimale-multifemale mating.Read more at location 1156
Gorilla Generally, a single dominant male (the so-called “Silverback”) occupies a range for his family unit composed of several females and young. Adolescent males are forced out of the group as they reach sexual maturity. Strongest social bonds are between the male and adult females. Polygynous mating.Read more at location 1159
Orangutan Orangutans are solitary and show little bonding of any kind. Male orangutans do not tolerate each other’s presence. An adult male establishes a large territory where several females live. Each has her own range. Mating is dispersed, infrequent and often violent.Read more at location 1162
Gibbon Gibbons establish nuclear family units; each couple maintains a territory from which other pairs are excluded. Mating is monogamous.Read more at location 1165
Doubting the Chimpanzee ModelRead more at location 1167
While chimps are extremely hierarchical, groups of human foragers are vehemently egalitarian. Meat sharing is precisely the occasion when chimp hierarchy is most evident, yet a successful hunt triggers the leveling mechanisms most important to human foraging societies.Read more at location 1169
while data from the chimps studied by Goodall and others at Gombe appear to support the idea that a ruthless and calculating selfishness is typical of chimpanzee behavior, information from other study sites may contradict or undermine this finding.Read more at location 1176
difficulties inherent in observing chimpanzee behavior in the wild,Read more at location 1177
There are also questions concerning how violent chimps are if left undisturbed in their natural habitat. As we discuss in Chapter 13, several factors could have profoundly altered the chimps’ observed behavior.Read more at location 1181
if we “change things such as food supplies, population densities, and the possibilities for spontaneous group formation and dissolution,…all hell breaks loose—no less for apes than for humans.”Read more at location 1183
“Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.”Read more at location 1187
Human groups tend to respond to food surplus and storage with behavior like that observed in chimps: heightened hierarchical social organization, intergroup violence, territorial perimeter defense, and Machiavellian alliances. In other words, humans—like chimps—tend to fight when there’s something worth fighting over. But for most of prehistory, there was no food surplus to win or lose and no home base to defend.Read more at location 1197
Just as the chimpanzee seems to embody the Hobbesian vision of human origins, the bonobo reflects the Rousseauian view.Read more at location 1210
De Waal sums up the difference between these two apes’ behavior by saying that “the chimpanzee resolves sexual issues with power; the bonobo resolves power issues with sex.”Read more at location 1212
“In war as in romance, bonobos and chimpanzees appear to be strikingly different. When two bonobo communities meet at a range boundary at Wamba…not only is there no lethal aggression as sometimes occurs in chimps, there may be socializing and even sex between females and the enemy community’s males.”Read more at location 1220
Just imagine that we had never heard of chimpanzees or baboons and had known bonobos first. We would at present most likely believe that early hominids lived in female-centered societies, in which sex served important social functions and in which warfare was rare or absent. FRANS DE WAALRead more at location 1232
Bonobos have no formalized rituals of dominance and submission like the status displays common to chimps, gorillas, and other primates. Although status is not completely absent, primatologist Takayoshi Kano, who has collected the most detailed information on bonobo behavior in the wild, prefers to use the term “influential” rather than “high-ranking” when describing female bonobos.Read more at location 1240
Those looking for evidence of matriarchy in human societies might ponder the fact that among bonobos, female “dominance” doesn’t result in the sort of male submission one might expect if it were simply an inversion of the male power structures found among chimps and baboons. The female bonobos use their power differently than male primates.Read more at location 1246
Despite their submissive social role, male bonobos appear to be much better off than male chimps or baboons. As we’ll see in later discussions of female-dominated societies, human males also tend to fare pretty well when the women are in charge. While Sapolsky chose to study baboons because of the chronically high stress levels males suffer as a result of their unending struggles for power, de Waal notes that bonobos confront a different sort of existence, saying, “in view of their frequent sexual activity and low aggression, I find it hard to imagine that males of the species have a particularly stressful time.”Read more at location 1249
bonobos “display many of the sexual habits people exhibit on the streets, in the bars and restaurants, and behind apartment doors in New York, Paris, Moscow, and Hong Kong.” “Prior to coitus,” she writes, “bonobos often stare deeply into each other’s eyes.” And Fisher assures her readers that, like human beings, bonobos “walk arm in arm, kiss each other’s hands and feet, and embrace with long, deep, tongue-intruding French kisses.”Read more at location 1268
Remember, we are genetically equidistant from chimps and bonobos.Read more at location 1276
female bonobos resume sexual behavior within a year of parturition.” Both these otherwise unique qualities of bonobo sexuality are shared by only one other primate species: Homo sapiens.Read more at location 1281
Fisher assumes the advent of pair bonding four million years ago despite the absence of any supporting evidence.Read more at location 1298
Here we have crystalline expression of the Flintstonizing that can distort the thinking of even the most informed theorists on the origins of human sexual behavior. We’re confident Dr. Fisher will find that what she calls “fundamental differences” in sexual behavior are not differences at all when she looks at the full breadth of information we coverRead more at location 1305
He calls for a new scenario that “acknowledges and explains the virtual absence of organized warfare among today’s human foragers, their egalitarian tendencies, and generosity with information and resources across groups.”Read more at location 1320
By projecting recent post-agricultural preoccupations with female fidelity into their vision of prehistory, many theorists have Flint-stonized their way right into a cul-de-sac.Read more at location 1322
Modern man’s seemingly instinctive impulse to control women’s sexuality is not an intrinsic feature of human nature. It is a response to specific historical socioeconomic conditions—conditions very different from those in which our species evolved. This is key to understanding sexuality in the modern world. De Waal is correct that this hierarchical, aggressive, and territorial behavior is of recent origin for our species. It is, as we’ll see, an adaptation to the social world that arose with agriculture.Read more at location 1323
Human and bonobo females copulate throughout menstrual cycle, as well as during lactation and pregnancy. Female chimps are sexually active only 25–40 percent of their cycle. Human and bonobo infants develop much more slowly than chimpanzees, beginning to play with others at about 1.5 years, much later than chimps. Like humans, female bonobos return to the group immediately after giving birth and copulate within months. They exhibit little fear of infanticide, which has never been observed in bonobos—captive or free-living. Bonobos and humans enjoy many different copulatory positions, with ventral-ventral (missionary position) appearing to be preferred by bonobo females and rear-entry by males, while chimps prefer rear-entry almost exclusively. Bonobos and humans often gaze into each other’s eyes when copulating and kiss each other deeply. Chimps do neither. The vulva is located between the legs and oriented toward the front of the body in humans and bonobos, rather than oriented toward the rear as in chimps and other primates. Food sharing is highly associated with sexual activity in humans and bonobos, only moderately so in chimps. There is a high degree of variability in potential sexual combinations in humans and bonobos; homosexual activity is common in both, but rare in chimps. Genital-genital (G-G) rubbing between female bonobos appears to affirm female bonding, is present in all bonobo populations studied (wild and captive), and is completely absent in chimpanzees. Human data on G-G rubbing are presently unavailable. (Attention: ambitious graduate students!) While sexual activity in chimps and other primates appears to be primarily reproductive, bonobos and humans utilize sexuality for social purposes (tension reduction, bonding, conflict resolution, entertainment, etc.).Read more at location 1341
