THE SOCIAL-BEHAVIOR OF CHIMPANZEES AND BONOBOS - EMPIRICAL-EVIDENCE AND SHIFTING ASSUMPTIONS

As our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos have been wid ely used as models of the behavior of early hominids. In recent years, as information on the social behavior and ecology of bonobos has come to light, many interspecific comparisons have been made. Chimpanzees have been characterized in terms of their intercommunity warfare, meat eating, infanticide, cannibalism, male status-striving, and dominance over females. Bonobos, meanwhile, have been portrayed as the ''Make l ove, not war'' ape, characterized by female power-sharing, a lack of a ggression between either individuals or groups, richly elaborated sexu al behavior that occurs without the constraint of a narrow window of f ertility, and the use of sex for communicative purposes. This paper ev aluates the evidence for this dichotomy and considers the reasons that contrasting portrayals of the two great apes have developed. While th ere are marked differences in social behavior between these two specie s, I argue that they are more similar behaviorally than most accounts have suggested. I discuss several reasons that current Views of bonobo and chimpanzee societies may not accord well with field data. Among t hese are a bias toward captive data on bonobos, the tendency to see bo nobos as derived because their behavior has been described more recent ly than that of chimpanzees, and the possibility that interpretations of bonobo-chimpanzee differences are reflections of human male-female differences.