“It was a very necessary first step,” said Samuni, a postdoctoral fellow in Harvard’s Pan Lab and the paper’s lead author. The research, published in PNAS, shows that four neighboring groups of bonobos they studied at the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve in the Democratic Republic of Congo maintained exclusive and stable social and spatial borders between them, showing they are indeed part of distinct social groups that interact regularly and peacefully with each other. A new study led by Harvard primatologists Liran Samuni and Martin Surbeck on the social structure of bonobos may begin to fill in some of the blanks. Some, however, have challenged this because of a lack of detailed data on how these groups work and how they separate themselves. The endangered primates share 99 percent of their DNA with humans and have a reputation for generally being peace-loving and sexually active - researchers jokingly refer to them “hippie apes.” And interactions between their social groups are thought to be much less hostile than among their more violent cousins, the chimpanzees. Scientists believe bonobos might serve as an evolutionary model. Along with being more aggressive and prone to violence, they are also marginally larger in size and more muscular.Humans display a capacity for tolerance and cooperation among social groups that is rare in the animal kingdom, our long history of war and political strife notwithstanding. However, if you were to place a wager on which species would win in a fight, chimpanzees would be the safer bet. Bonobo vs chimpanzee fight: Who would win?ĭue to the great Congo River, the natural territories of bonobos and chimps don't overlap, so the two species will never come into contact in the wild. They additionally engage in face-to-face sex, which is almost unheard of among primates (except, once again, for humans). Likewise, males have been reported to engage in oral sex with other males and are often observed humping each other.īonobos are the only animal, except for humans, that is known to engage in tongue kissing. Female bonobos are often seen enjoying mutual genital-rubbing behavior, which seems to play an important role in establishing the female-led hierarchy of the group. ![]() They will engage in sexual acts throughout the day and appear to use it as a way to build bonds with one another.Īll bonobos frequently have homosexual sex too, showing little concern for whether their partner is of the same sex or a different sex. They can be prone to violence, but they tend to settle their disputes through sex rather than violence. Their temperament is noticeably more relaxed and friendly than that of chimps. Bonobos are also born with dark black faces and pink lips, while chimps start life with a pale pink face that darkens as they age.īonobos are lovers, not fighters. Bonobo vs chimpanzee differenceīonobos tend to have a more slender body with skinnier limbs, while chimps are stocky and more muscular. Since non-human great apes hate to swim, they became permanently cut off from each other when the rivers rose.Īs such, today we only find bonobos to the south of the river in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and chimps to the north of the river in a wider portion of Central Africa and West Africa. So the theory goes, one plucky group of ancestral chimps made it across the shallow river and began following separate evolutionary paths to become bonobos. Analysis of the river sediment suggests that the river’s water level dropped significantly around the time when chimpanzees and bonobos are thought to have diverged. One well-established hypothesis is that this split occurred because of the Congo River. ![]() These two cousins diverged from each other over 1 million years ago.
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