Posts Tagged ‘play’
bonobo issues
Something I encountered in S J Gould’s book Life’s Grandeur, added to other little encounters in my readings and researchings, has caused a few concerns. In trying to promote bonoboism, of a kind, the last thing I’d want to do is limit humanity’s intellectual pursuits, curiosity, adaptability and general gung-ho cleverness. As if I had the power haha. So whenever I read or hear something that might suggest that bonobos aren’t as smart as chimps I get worried.
Anyway, my reading, as usual, took me on some internet journeys, in one of which I found that the average chimp brain volume is 398 cc while that of bonobos is 348 cc. Remember of course that bonobos used to be known as pygmy chimps, and the average difference in overall size between the two species pretty well corresponds to the difference in brain size, and, as smart corvids and other birds remind us, size isn’t always an indicator of such things.
But there are other worries. I’ve gotten the impression that chimps are very much tool-users, bonobos perhaps not so much. But now, on consulting the literature more closely, I’m finding that maybe this isn’t so, and so I’m losing the point of this post. But of course there are differences, behaviourally, and so cognitively, between the two species, which would be worth exploring, for our future’s sake.
A scientific article, linked below, going back to 2010, and not fully available to amateurs like me, has this to say in its abstract:
Our observations illustrate that tool use in bonobos can be highly complex and no different from what has been described for chimpanzees. The only major difference in the chimpanzee and bonobo data was that bonobos of all age–sex classes used tools in a play context, a possible manifestation of their neotenous nature. We also found that female bonobos displayed a larger range of tool use behaviours than males, a pattern previously described for chimpanzees but not for other great apes. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that the female-biased tool use evolved prior to the split between bonobos and chimpanzees.
As to their ‘neotenous’ (i.e. eternally childlike) nature, I’m wondering. Are they really any more childlike than chimps? Apparently, that’s the consensus. A more recent piece in Current Biology by Isabel Behncke, ‘Play in the Peter Pan ape’ (Peter Pan being the boy who never grows up) looks into this issue of bonobo neoteny, and play, noting that there’s a ‘small cluster of species in which adult play occurs, such as elephants, primates, social carnivores, cetaceans, parrots and corvids’. These are all highly social species, with otherwise little in the way of evolutionary connection. They do have other connections, though, apart form sociality – longevity, and neural complexity.
Behncke, in studying bonobos in the wild, argues that bonobos are more neotenous and playful than chimps, and one of her reasons for this corresponds with my own thoughts, happily. They live in a relatively abundant calorific habitat, and ‘play is energetically expensive and dwindles in conditions of resource scarcity’. Hence all those videos featuring pets at play. Hence, also, our own playful nature – sport, art, music, salons and pub chit-chat. Even our scientific explorations can be considered a form of play, at a stretch.
And then there’s sex, that Big Issue that humans beat themselves up about. Bonobo play is less solitary than that of chimps, and more sexual. I also would note that the development of tool use, which has, as mentioned, been more associated with females than males, in both bonobos and chimps, is surely associated with play. But much play between bonobos is genital-based. ‘Chasing’, especially around a solitary object such as a tree, and genital-grabbing is common, which of course can be potentially painful, but according to Behncke virtually never results in serious injury. This often happens between members of different troupes, and Behncke points out here a vital difference between the two tightly related primates. Chimps exhibit hostility between troupes, with ‘wars’ sometimes ending in wipeouts, as Jane Goodall and others have reported. Of the often fatal injuries sustained, mutilated genitals are high on the list.
So, about the sex. But first, it should be noted that communal or paired play is often about trust. The ‘hanging’ game, for example, is often played between an adult and a juvenile bonobo, in which the adult lets the child dangle from her arm, from a more or less high tree branch. Like bungee jumping, without the elasticity, but with much of the thrill. Also, play (and sex) occurs with a multitude of partners, with attendant advantages:
Play-partner diversity is important when thinking about adaptability: playing 100 times with the same individual requires less variation and adjustment of behaviour than playing 10 times with 10 different individuals. Playing with individuals of different sizes, personalities and sex requires learning about contextual-dependent behaviour: with whom and when a bite is appropriate, a chase over a push, a gentle tickle rather than a stomping slap, and so on.
So, much of this research has assured me that we’re on the right track in becoming more bonoboesque humans, in spite of Trump, Putin, Musk and other throwbacks. I’m hoping that even the USA will have a female President some time in the 21st century, and if they progress even further along the bonobo line, they might scrap their worthless semi-monarchical Presidential system altogether…
Okay, maybe in the 22nd century…
Sorry, never really got round to the sex.
References
bonobos, humans, sex, kids, community and work: an interminable conversation 1
just being cosy
Canto: We need to face the sex issue, which is such a problematic one for humans, and far less problematic, it seems, for bonobos.
Jacinta:Yes, they don’t need a Me Too movement, coz the males are already scared of them. I mean the boss females.
Canto: Well it’s not just the males hitting on the females. In bonobo societies, it’s males on males, females on females, old on young, kids on kids, but with a minimum of fuss and bother, it seems to me. And it’s not all the time, I don’t want to exaggerate anything. There are no nymphomaniacs, whatever that means.
Jacinta: A pejorative term. The male equivalents are called studs.
Canto: Well, not always. Sometimes called sex addicts. And paedophiles of course. Suitable cases for treatment. And I remember a group calling themselves ‘sluts on bikes’, seeking to retool the term for their own benefit somehow. I think there’s a lot of confusion or uncertainty out there, about whether an overdeveloped interest in sex is good or bad. And of course there’s a big issue about sexual victims, which doesn’t seem a problem for bonobos.
Jacinta: Not a major problem, but the females appear to keep the males in line, if they go too far. After all much of the sexual stuff is just mutual masturbation.
Canto: Yeah, nowadays, human males – and maybe females – get off on porn, or their own fantasies, wanking in the safe confines of their bedrooms, imagining touchy-feelies rather than experiencing them. It’s quite sad. Bonobos don’t have that problem.
Jacinta: It’s certainly true that there are plenty of sexually unsatisfied human apes around. But maybe if they weren’t so aware of sex – especially the hypersexuality of porn – they wouldn’t be so obsessed with what they’re missing out on. Take orangutans. They’re mostly isolated, and I doubt if they spend much time masturbating…
Canto: Ah but they do spend some time on it. If the Gizmodo website is to be trusted, masturbation has been observed in at least 80 types of male primates, and 50 types of female primates, including orangutans. And I don’t quite trust that male-female disparity.
Jacinta: Yes, that’s odd. And the point is that the crotch area is the most erogenous zone for all mammals, surely – and then some. And it doesn’t require fantasising about sexy other members of your species. Think of the first time you masturbated…
Canto: I really can’t recall the first time….
Jacinta: It’s highly likely you found your pubes rubbing against something, and it felt, well, stimulating, so you rubbed some more. Nothing directly to do with sex, for us or for other mammals. When a dog starts humping your leg, it’s not actually humping, or thinking of humping, presumably.
Canto: So it’s all about chemicals, fireworks in the brain, or something? A dog humps your leg because he’s excited, and humping gets him more excited. But it’s the old chicken and egg – does it start with the humping or the excitement?
Jacinta: Well I suppose the main point for us is that masturbation is natural and common for many species, given the evolution of erogenous zones, especially the zone associated with reproduction. But I’m more interested in another phenomenon – reproduction. In spite of their interest in sex, bonobo females are unable, it seems, to produce more than a few offspring in their lives. According to Wikipedia, the most offspring produced by a human female, that we know of, is 44, 43 of whom survived infancy. That’s a woman in Uganda, whose last child was born in 2016. There are recordings of greater numbers in previous centuries, but they’re insufficiently verified. And this woman, Mariam Nabatanzi, wasn’t just showing off, she had a rare condition that caused hyperovulation. Her births included 3 sets of quadruplets, 4 of triplets and 6 of twins, and she might’ve added to the number but a procedure she underwent in 2019, at age 40, put a stop to it all.
Canto: Elon Musk would’ve been proud of her.
Jacinta: Yeah, well, I wonder if he’s helping pay Ms Nabatanzi’s food bills, though hopefully her unwonted fame would help with that. It’s interesting that both Franz de Waal and Jane Goodall mention, in the beautifully photographed Deutsche Welle documentary referenced below, that the ability of humans to reproduce rapidly compared to other primates has been a vital factor in our dominance of the biosphere, with its positive and negative impacts. De Waal suggests that this high reproductive rate is somehow due to the family structure we’ve developed, with the father helping out the mother, not so much directly as indirectly, as material provider and support. But I think this claim needs more support or more fleshing out.
Canto: Yes, it seems to fly in the face of what we know about bonobo culture, where the mother seems to be helped out by other females, and males, in a tight-knit community. Or is this an exaggeration? I recall reading that this community care, or extended family care, occurs in corvids as well. I don’t know how many chicks the average crow gives birth to in a lifetime. Anyway, it seems that the long intervals between births in chimps and bonobos is more psychological, or cultural if you like, than physiological. The mothers do much of the caring and feeding, and it’s exhausting. Humans have bottle-feeding for instance, and anyone can be in charge of that. I did it for my little brother when I was a kid, and even learned to change nappies. Human mothers are sometimes back at work weeks or even days after giving birth.
Jacinta: Which would require other carers. Maybe we’re not so selfish as we think. But then again, in the WEIRD world we’re having fewer children, and as other regions become more well-off they’re having fewer children too.
Canto: Except for Elon Musk.
Jacinta: Crows generally lay a clutch of 2-7 eggs every nesting season – that’s one clutch every year. About 40 percent of all the corvid species are co-operative breeders, a much bigger percentage than other bird species. Crows’ lifespans can vary wildly – some can live for more than twenty years, and of course it’s hard to say how many offspring they produce in a lifetime, never mind how many of their chicks survive to adulthood. But returning to humans and bonobos, both species make a habit of having sex for fun, though with bonobos it’s more of a standard thing – they don’t have killjoy religious figures or ’empowered’ celibates spoiling the party.
Canto: We’re certainly a long way from public sex. Even nudist colonies now seem a distant memory, and they were about as sexy as an old fart’s farts.
Jacinta: Well, that’s a bit rough. We’re just so much more diverse than bonobos, you can’t compare. Everything from lifetime vows of celibacy to sex dungeons, about which I know nothing.
Canto: We’ll explore them, no doubt. But of course bonobos, when they’re not eating and sleeping, have a lot of time for play. They’re not trying to create the next exciting technology or to quantise gravity or to become the richest entrepreneur in the jungle or to take over their neighbours’ territory or whatever. All play, even sexual play, and no work can be a bit mind-numbing perhaps. A bit of your old Freudian sublimation isn’t such a bad thing.
Jacinta: How about getting AI to do all the smart stuff and we just play?
Canto: Ahh, now you’re talking about the future, beyond where we’ll be, unless those longevity diets really kick in…
References
https://gizmodo.com/9-animals-that-masturbate-other-than-humans-1723592357
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_the_most_children