Scientists have long sought clues about human behavior by studying our closest animal relative, the chimpanzee. That has been discouraging at times, because chimp society offers a bleak view of the struggle for survival. There are gangs of aggressive males, occasional infanticide, the rape and beatings of females and fierce, sometimes lethal, competition for food, sex and territory.
But a different branch of our primate family tree demonstrates the flip side of the natural-selection coin. The bonobo, an elusive ape living in rain forests of Congo, offers an intriguing alternative to the chimps' male-based model of human evolution--just the thing for this post-feminist era.
Bonobos (pronounced bo-NO-bo) are graceful, egalitarian and largely pacific. Like chimps, bonobos have DNA that is 98% identical to humans'. They draw social rank from their mothers' status. Powerful female alliances protect against infanticide and male bullying of females and enable females to feed before males.
With the exception of hyenas and the lemurs of Madagascar, mammals are male dominated, says Frans de Waal, an internationally renowned primatologist at Emory University in Atlanta.
"Bonobos never needed the feminist revolution because probably for thousands of years females have been dominating males," De Waal writes in "Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape" (University of California Press, 1997), the first profile of the bonobo written for a general audience.
Best known as the "sexy" primate, bonobos "act as if they had read the Kama Sutra," says De Waal, who based his book upon studies of bonobos in captivity (there are only 100, including colonies at the San Diego Zoo and San Diego Wild Animal Park) and in the wild where they are vulnerable to extinction because of habitat encroachment.
Sex is the bonobos' social currency. Friction is eased with a quick orgy in which the bonobo, like a sexual acrobat, uses every imaginable form of erotica including fondling, masturbation, homosexual sex and face-to-face copulation.
"Bonobos have perfected the art of female alliances and found a solution to infanticide. Once you have gone that far, why not go all the way?"
Ecologically speaking, bonobo female alliances are possible because ground vegetation is plentiful, effectively eliminating competition for it. Among chimps, De Waal says, females are forced to be loners, foraging for scarce food in competition with bands of male chimps (that align themselves by male kin) and with gorillas.
