WE KNOW them as the most highly sexed of all the apes. Now it appears that the easy-going social life enjoyed by bonobos makes them better at cooperating than their more aggressive chimp cousins.
Brian Hare of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues tested how well chimps and bonobos coped with challenging social situations. Bonobos, they found, were more likely to share a plate of food, using play or sex to defuse social tensions. In contrast, chimps’ more limited social skills meant one individual was more likely to take all the food.
The researchers…
