a bonobo humanity?

sounds good

Do bonobos have families? Apparently not, since they aren’t considered monogamous, and monogamy (even failed or disrupted monogamy) and families go together. Don’t they?

First, let’s look at bonobos and child-rearing. It’s accepted that they’re matriarchal, and non-monogamous, and that humans are, by and large, patriarchal and monogamous. And the human family was surely an emergent ‘property’ of monogamous patriarchy. But before we go into further comparisons, let’s compare bonobos and their non-monogamous cousins, chimps. 

Intriguingly, the idea of a cuddly-cosy bonobo parental style versus one which is often disrupted by infanticidal impulses from alpha male chimps, needs to be – adjusted, to say the least. According to observations described in a Scientific American article linked below, bonobo parents – that’s to say, mothers – are less likely to intervene when their child is bullied and mistreated by other adults than chimp mothers with their kids. This must be understood in the context of less extreme aggression compared to chimp culture, which has been known to involve infanticide as well as slaughter between chimp troupes. 

So why the hands-off bonobo parenting style? More research is no doubt needed, but the article argues for a more protective mothering style among chimps precisely because of the threats both within and beyond the troupe: 

one possible explanation is that the constant threat of violence in chimpanzee life could prime chimps to defend other members of their social group, regardless of the situation. In-group bonds are “a really core part” of chimp society… Chimpanzees “can take big risks to protect each other in encounters [with a hostile group]—like leaping over to cover someone who’s being attacked” with their own body.

So, counter-intuitively, bonobo ‘tough love’ might be a product of a more general easy-going, danger-free environment. And as to families, it’s essentially a single-mother situation, with help from others in the troupe, including males. This is especially so with sons, who are philopatric, while daughters disperse to other troupes. Bonobo mothers are generally extremely protective, one might say controlling, of their sons, including encouraging them, even forcing them, to mate with females of the mother’s choosing. All of which makes me wonder about that female-dominated human society which will surely prevail in the millennia to come, if we manage to survive patriarchy. 

And if we do, will we become as boringly sexualised as bonobos, while human civilisation crumbles around us? My prediction, FWIW, is – yes and no. After all, today we have pornography as well as astrophysics, palaeontology, biochemistry, quantum computing (almost?) and artificial intelligence – though not all at the same time. And on the sexual side of things, at least in the WEIRD world, we’ve definitely become more permissive, just in the last few decades, and I can’t see such a trend reversing. So some will be more drawn to the sexual side of life, some to the more analytic, and many will have a foot, or other parts of their anatomy, in both camps. It’s all experimentation after all. 

References

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chimpanzees-and-bonobos-have-surprisingly-different-parenting-styles/#:~:text=Bonobo%20society%20is%20matriarchal%2C%20and,“wingwoman”%20to%20mate%20successfully.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190520171625.htm