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[Josh Greenman <josh.greenman AT gmail.com>]

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/06/bonobos-have-a-secret.html

Bonobos have a secret

11:35 21 June 2010

In the 1920s Robert Yerkes acquired an unusual ape that he named
Prince Chim. Chim was more intelligent, fun-loving, cooperative,
emotionally positive and full of life than his chimpanzee companion,
Panzee. Chim's vocal behaviour was so prolific and reminiscent of
language that Yerkes transcribed it using musical notation. Yerkes had
discovered the bonobo.

In the 80s and 90s researchers conducted a study comparing a chimp and
a bonobo. The aim was to determine if Yerkes's observations were
accurate and if either animal, or both, could learn a human language
through cultural immersion rather than instruction. The answer for
both apes was yes.

Vanessa Woods writes engagingly of her husband, primatologist Brian
Hare, struggling to tackle these questions again. Seemingly ignorant
of the earlier work, in 2005 Hare embarked on a mission to find out
what differentiates bonobos from chimps. With the Democratic Republic
of Congo still mired in the aftermath of war, he travelled to the Lola
Ya sanctuary in Kinshasa to study bonobos.

Hare found that bonobos do all kinds of things that chimps are not
reported to do: they experience constant genital arousal, become
attached to individual humans, think up new ways to engage in sexual,
altruistic or cooperative behaviour on an essentially non-stop basis,
and they die of broken hearts. In short they are a lot like people,
even uncomfortably so - a fact that, ironically, has caused many
scientists to ignore them.

At the sanctuary, local women are hired to raise baby bonobos during
the day. As Hare replicated Yerkes's experiments to test bonobos'
ability to cooperate, the women were unimpressed. At times they were
the only ones who could get the bonobos - who were busy cooperating
with each other - to cooperate with the researchers.

The bonobos insisted on establishing a rapport with the experimenter
before every trial. As Woods explains, this often involved some form
genital touching - a "bonobo handshake" as she calls it. The
researchers failed nearly every test of bonobo socio-sexual etiquette.
Worse, they failed to grasp the reality of their own situation: that
they are dealing with cultural, not genetic, variables.

In Hare's mind, if a bonobo does something, it must be genetically
motivated. He did not see how the force of culture shapes both
behaviour and biology across generations. Culture has been confused
with genes because behavioural studies are short-term, while culture
operates on the scale of generations with a kind of tyranny and force
that has not been widely recognised.

Readers can be grateful that a journalist, not bound by unspoken
conventions regarding what scientists must never say about non-human
primates, married a primatologist. Hare may be the scientist, but
Woods conveys the real significance of bonobo culture. She thinks that
bonobos have a secret: they can tell us how to avoid war.

The question of whether humans are genetically more like chimpanzees
or bonobos pops up throughout the book, but as the book also makes
clear, whatever the genetic similarities, bonobo culture is not human
culture, and nor is chimpanzee culture human culture. Humans are
doomed to war, genocide, environmental degradation and eventually
self-destruction only if we fail to grasp the processes of culture and
continue to take a short-sighted view of what it can mean to be
bonobo, chimpanzee or human.

To read Woods's elegant and entertaining book is to share the
experience of a soul realising there is something more - something
mankind must learn. In that self-realisation is the secret of the
bonobos.