a bonobo humanity?

bonobo mother and child

Jacinta: So how is the bonobo influence faring these days – in Afghanistan, Iran, Trumpistan, Pakistan, China, Russia, Israel and Burma, to name a few…?

Canto: Okay, enough goat-getting. I’m still fascinated by how bonobos – more genetically similar to chimps, of course, than to humans – came to be so different. It’s not genetics, so what is it? It can’t just be diet, or habitat. And, my feeling is, if you know how something works, you can build it yourself. Like, if you know how beehives work you can build your own beehive, which we’ve done.

Jacinta: Not quite the same as building a new social system methinks. Though they have tried, haven’t they? ‘Let’s go to the Americas and build a Paraiso en el Nuevo Mundo‘… ‘But isn’t it already inhabited?’ ‘Yeah, we might need a bit of rubbish-clearing to start with’.

Canto: You’d think that our discovery of the bonobo lifestyle, really only a few decades ago, its feminism, its relative pacifism, its great community spirit, not to mention the sex, would be of interest to more than just a few primatologists, especially given the world of warfare, rapine and religious numbskullduggery that so many of us are still trapped within – it makes me scream with frustration.

Jacinta: It seems that the timber of humanity is more crooked than that of bonobos. I reckon we took a really wrong turn a few million years ago, so now we’re lost in the patriarchal jungle and we’ll never find our way back.

Canto: But bonobos are showing us the way don’t you see? And if humans didn’t make life so difficult for them, and their habitat wasn’t so fouled and fenced in by human depredations, they’d be so numerous, such a dominant force in the landscape, they’d put us to shame.

Jacinta: Haha we’re a pretty shameless species I’m afraid. Anyway, aren’t bonobos the anomalous ones? Chimps vastly outnumber them, despite the same human depredations. It be Nature, and what do please Evolution. If they hadn’t been separated into two species by the formation of the Congo River, they’d still be one species, and patriarchal, I’m betting.

Canto: Wow, who’s side are you on? Whether bonobos’ ancestors were patriarchal or not is beside the point to me. The point is, they’re matriarchal now, who cares when it started. And they’re happy, and successful. And we humans want to be happy, or happier, and more successful. So we might learn from bonobos about being less aggressive, less cruel, less exploitative, less competitive, and more caring, more playful, more communal, more uninhibited…

Jacinta: Okay, okay, I get it. But I’m wondering about that aggression, or at least that competitiveness. Hasn’t it been to our advantage as a species? The space race, the battles between competing scientific theories, between political ideologies and the like, haven’t they sharpened the collective human mind? Aren’t bonobos a bit intellectually lazy? I’ve read somewhere that chimps are more consistent toolmakers than bonobos. Or would you rather we lived in some timeless hippy-bonobo nirvana?

Canto: Okay, let’s look at the evidence, or what we have of it. Michael Tomasello et al published a research study in the journal PloS One in 2010, entitled ‘Differences in the Cognitive Skills of Bonobos and Chimpanzees’. Here’s the whole abstract from it:

While bonobos and chimpanzees are both genetically and behaviorally very similar, they also differ in significant ways. Bonobos are more cautious and socially tolerant while chimpanzees are more dependent on extractive foraging, which requires tools. The similarities suggest the two species should be cognitively similar while the behavioral differences predict where the two species should differ cognitively. We compared both species on a wide range of cognitive problems testing their understanding of the physical and social world. Bonobos were more skilled at solving tasks related to theory of mind or an understanding of social causality, while chimpanzees were more skilled at tasks requiring the use of tools and an understanding of physical causality. These species differences support the role of ecological and socio-ecological pressures in shaping cognitive skills over relatively short periods of evolutionary time.

Mirroring individual differences observed in theory of mind development in human children, the more cautious and socially tolerant bonobos outperformed chimpanzees on the theory of mind scale. Meanwhile, the prolific tool-using chimpanzee, whose survival is more dependent on extractive foraging, outperformed bonobos in the tool-use and causality scale.

This pattern can potentially be interpreted as suggesting that bonobos are more skilled at solving problems requiring an understanding of social causality, while chimpanzees are more skilled at solving problems relating to physical causality. In contrast, the two species did not differ in the scales measuring their understanding of problems related to spatial comprehension, discriminating quantities, using and comprehending communicative signals and learning from others via a social demonstration. This pattern of findings provides support for the hypothesis that socio-ecological pressures play an important role in shaping the cognitive differences observed between these species.

Long-term observations of wild chimpanzees have suggested that female chimpanzees acquire more proficient tool-using techniques faster than males, and other studies show a similar pattern in captive bonobos. Therefore, it may be that socio-ecological pressures play a more limited role in producing cognitive differences based on sex in these species, but it also suggests that female Panins pay closer attention to others which allows them to learn and solve social problems more quickly and skillfully than males (while both sexes perform similarly in physical cognition tasks).