a bonobo humanity?

girls girls girls

One of the things that pissed me off about the ‘evolutionary psychologist’ who mocked a female writer who found inspiration in bonobos, was that he himself expressed not the slightest curiosity about how this species, the closest one to humans along with chimps, actually became female dominant. He was too busy trying to argue that we had nothing to learn from these apes, and that our ‘psychology’ was patriarchal from the get-go, and presumably always will be.

Anyway, enough of him. Many women have been inspired by bonobos and this will continue into the future. And we know that the principal feature of their dominance is sisterhood. Here’s how the NY Times put it in an article posted last April:

… researchers who tracked six bonobo communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo over nearly 30 years provided the first evidence-based explanation for how female bonobos gain and sustain dominance over the males within their communities. Females, they found, form coalitions against males to tip the balance of power in their favor.

When a male bonobo steps out of line, nearby females will band together to attack or intimidate him. Males who cower in the face of such conflicts lose social rank, while their female adversaries gain it, affording them better access to food, and mates for their sons.

Much is made in the article, and in other material I’ve read, that bonobos are not exactly the peaceful ape they’re claimed to be. But who claims this? My own focus has always been on matriarchy, not at all on peace. In human society, women have been murderers and child abusers – but of course not on anything like the level of men. Bonobo females sometimes have to deal aggressively with uppity males – often targeting the private parts (not so private for non-human primates). Chimp males on the other hand, and even females, have sometimes engaged in infanticide, and whole chimp troupes have been known to wipe out other troupes in all-out warfare.

Bonobos deal with tension between troupes through food-sharing and of course mutual masturbation (producing that sticky stuff that brings folk together). There has as yet been no solid evidence of bonobos killing bonobos, but it may well happen from time to time. So how did they come to be so different after, at most, 2 million years of separation from chimps? The time frame is important, considering the differences between the two species, and some studies argue for less than a million years.

As the article above points out, it’s about coalitions, a Bonobo Sisterhood, as Diane Rosenfeld has argued, most cogently, as a template for human females. So how and why did this sisterhood evolve? My thought on this is that, in the forests of the region south of the Congo, there was an abundant enough food supply, mostly frugivorous, so that hunting and physically overcoming animal resources became surplus to requirements. Physical size and strength was less important – as is the case in post-industrial human societies. That’s why we now allow women into the military and other ‘tough’ forms of employment, at least in more enlightened societies. And along with those changes we have women being ‘trusted’ to run businesses, to head scientific and legal teams, and even to be elected into parliaments and occasionally become Prime Ministers or Presidents. But of course the balance of power, even in the ‘enlightened’ WEIRD world, is still massively in favour of men. But, l’avenir est féminin, my t-shirt proclaims, and l’avenir est long….

And again, for those who are apt to mock the idea that we can learn anything from our ‘dumb’ ape cousins, I’ve been reminded, through an essay just sent to me by a friend, and referenced below, of Kanzi the bonobo, who ‘stunned the world’ with his cognitive abilities. It’s extremely doubtful that he’s a ‘freak’, a Stephen Hawking of the bonobo world, though the fact that he was brought up in captivity, with human carers, must be taken into account.

References

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/147470491501300115

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/science/bonobos-matriarchies-females.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/science/bonobos-apes-matriarchy.html

Diane Rosenfeld, The bonobo sisterhood: revolution through female alliance, 2023

A bonobo named Kanzi could play pretend, challenging ideas about animal imaginations