The hippie of the jungle – Magazine ?

More than 50 years ago, the famous Kenyan-British anthropologist Louis Leakey helped revolutionize the field of primatology when he sent three young biologists to study three of the four species of great apes that exist in the jungles of Africa and Asia. Jane Goodall devoted herself to chimpanzees; Dian Fossey to the gorillas; and Biruté Galdikas to the red orangutans (see As you see? No. 160). They were called the “Leakey Angels.”

Although Louis Leakey died before he could send a “fourth angel” to observe the lesser-known bonobo, that angel nevertheless exists. Her name is Claudine André, a 65-year-old copper-haired Belgian-Congolese conservationist who saw the devastation caused by the civil war of the early 1990s in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and she knew she had to do something.

Sometimes called “the graceful chimpanzee”, or “pygmy”, the bonobo (Pan paniscus) is a species of great ape very different from the other three. He is the hippie of the jungle. The boy who “does not make war but makes love”, within a peaceful society commanded by females. “Impossible not to succumb to such a combination,” Claudine André tells me one afternoon by phone from Lola Ya Bonobo, the only sanctuary in the world for this species, on the outskirts of Kinshasa, capital of the Congo. His velvety French accent is periodically interrupted by cuts in the overseas signal.

Bonobos live only in the impenetrable jungles of that country, geographically separated from gorillas and chimpanzees, in their own private Eden—albeit filled with guerrillas. Unlike chimpanzees, their faces are black, they have intensely pink lips, and they often walk on two legs for long distances. They were never taken to America for laboratory experiments. They also did not travel to space, and are practically not seen in a zoo; At most there are 150 bonobos in reserves around the world. The deciphering of the bonobo genome, which was announced in June 2012 in the journal Nature, indicates that we share the same amount of DNA with chimpanzees and bonobos: 99.6%, but we have certain genes that we only have in common with bonobos, and other genes that we only share with chimpanzees. For example, humans and bonobos have a protein in common that makes us more likely to detect social signals. This study was carried out by a multinational team of scientists and led by Kay Prüfer from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

When the social structure of bonobos was finally understood about 30 years ago, thanks to the work of ethologist and primatologist Frans de Waal, there was a stir in the scientific community. Here is a species of great ape that does not patrol the margins of its territories, does not attack others, does not kill or eat infants, does not join with other males to terrorize the group and does not torture its enemies. In fact, he has no enemies. Here is an ape who uses sex to resolve conflicts, as a kind of social lubricant. Sex belongs to everyone and is practiced by everyone in an astonishing quantity and variety. They do it all: oral sex, French kissing, manual manipulation or brief rubbing of the genitals. Masturbation, on the other hand, is rarely seen, and there are rarely encounters that lead to orgasm, because what bonobos practice is social sex. Sort of like, “Hello, how are you?”

Much of what is known about bonobos has been learned by studying them at sites like Lola Ya; that is, controlled environments, which are not their wild state. But primatologist Tetsuya Sakamaki, from Kyoto University, has been observing them for some time in one of their inaccessible natural jungle enclaves, on the left bank of the Lualaba River, in the Wanda reserve, founded by himself in 1974. Sakamaki’s conclusion is that the repertoire of behaviors among bonobos is amplified during captivity, simply because they have more time on their hands. Not being worried about searching for food, they have plenty of hours to indulge in love games. In the wild they also show some hidden aggressiveness. According to the anthropologist Gottfried Hohmann, from Max Planck, these are not crude and violent fights, as happens with chimpanzees. Bonobos do not kill each other, and their fights are not frequent. Hohman has found that they occasionally hunt antelope and monkeys for food. This researcher studies stress levels in wild bonobos near Salonga National Park in the Congo by examining the concentration of the hormone cortisol in the animals’ urine.

Bonobos “are extraordinary in so many ways,” says Claudine André emphatically from the other side of the world. “But quite frankly, I think it’s five minutes until midnight falls upon them.” Anticipating the extinction of the bonobos, André adds: “I’m glad I’m 65, you know? Because I’m not going to see the last great ape in the world.”

That same week I have the opportunity to talk in Durham, North Carolina, with Brian Hare, a 35-year-old American anthropologist who works in part with the Max Planck Institute. His mentor was the famous primatologist Richard Wrangham of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, one of the first to describe a bonobo.

“I must confess that I didn’t know about the existence of bonobos. Does this happen to many people?” I ask.

“No one knows anything about bonobos, and there are only a handful of people researching them,” Hare says with a bearded smile. He has just returned from Lola Ya, where he spent several weeks studying Claudine André’s in the company of his wife, the Australian researcher and writer Vanessa Woods. “Even the most educated people are surprised when they first hear about these apes.”

This is for several reasons. On the one hand, they were only discovered in 1928, and that by chance, when the German zoologist Ernst Scharz realized that the skull he was holding in his hands was not that of a young chimpanzee, as it was labeled, but that of a species totally different animal. On the other hand, the bonobos are concentrated within an incredibly dense jungle, where there is no infrastructure of any kind, no roads, or anything at all. A jungle in the heart of a nation that has been at war for more than 60 years, where conditions are volatile and quite dangerous. And the third reason is that, compared to chimpanzees, which exist in at least 20 countries in numbers exceeding one million, there are very few bonobos: you couldn’t even fill a small stadium with them.

Brian Hare does not hide his feelings: “I love chimpanzees very much, because I worked with them for years. But I love bonobos. Chimpanzees are that boy at school like the one you always wanted to be. But the bonobos are like the boy of school that you always wanted to be with. They are very funny, they look you straight and straight in the eyes and… yes, I know that this is something that I should not say as a scientist, I should not anthropomorphize them: but the bonobos manage to to convince you that you really mean something to them.

Selected for tolerance

There is very little scientific literature on bonobos: there are no more than 100 scientific reports, compared to the thousands on chimpanzees. However, there are controversial studies that suggest that bonobos are “superior” beings than chimpanzees. “They are because they are more tolerant of each other. My specific interest is studying how bonobos relate and tolerate each other without regard to social rank, hierarchy or sex,” says Hare. “The ultimate goal is to find the roots of our own social tolerance, our own intelligence. That is, if we want to learn about our evolution, ultimately we need to work with bonobos because our common ancestor was probably strikingly similar to theirs.”

In one of Hare’s experiments at Lola Ya, chimpanzees and bonobos, in separate studies, were given two piles of food that they could share or not share. “We saw how the bonobos played a lot with each other before sitting down to share food, without getting jealous that others were eating from the same pile. Instead, the chimpanzees avoided each other, sat as far away as they could, and “They made it clear that ‘this is my pile of food and I’m not going to give you anything.'”

“Then we did another experiment which consisted of putting a single pile of food out of reach, in such a way that the only way to get to it was to work together by pulling a rope simultaneously from both sides. The bonobos discovered the trick immediately and obtained mountains of food, while the chimpanzees pulled the rope only on one side. That’s why they ended up frustrated and hungry. That is, chimpanzees are equally smart as the bonobos. They know how to solve the dilemma to get the food, but their big problem is that “They do not trust their partner. Instead, bonobos work with any other bonobo, regardless of their hierarchy within the group, and also with any bonobo from another group outside their own.”

The lesson of the study is this: Researchers are interested in discovering what it is that allows humans to cooperate in ways that look more sophisticated than those of other animals. But what is often not taken into account is something obvious:…