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October 15, 2008
Those Bonobos - the chimps that made love, not war
Well this is a relief. Science has proved, once again, that conflict is more natural than peace. Me, I'm not surprised, but people who took college anthropology courses might be, if their professors liked to make analogies between people and animal behavior.
A type of chimpanzee known to use sex for greetings, reconciliations, and favors may not be all about peace, love, and understanding after all. A new study reveals that some bonobos--one of humankind's closest genetic relatives--hunt and eat other primates. [I love that weasely "some". Let's face it - bonobos eat monkeys. Where were all the qualifications of "the bonobos we have observed so far" back when they were telling us how the bonobo showed that free floating sex produced peaceful chimps? Don't believe my report of utopianism - go read the wikipedia entry, where the females are also reported to have a higher status. So far it doesn't have any monkey-eating.]Groups of the endangered chimpanzee subspecies were observed stalking, chasing, and killing monkeys they later consumed.
Scientists have long known from stool samples that some bonobos eat rodents and small antelopes in their natural forest habitats in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), but many researchers thought this was the extent of their hunting activities.
Gottfried Hohmann and Martin Surbeck, at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, thought differently.
"We saw that their relations with neighboring monkeys were frequently hostile and found a black mangabey finger in bonobo feces last year," Hohmann said.
"We did not know if the mangabey had been killed by another predator and then scavenged by the bonobo or if the bonobo had killed the mangabey itself, but this raised our suspicions."
Posted by CrankyProfessor at October 15, 2008 1:22 PM