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The Brutal Ape vs. the Sexy Ape? Author(s): Craig B. Stanford Reviewed work(s): Source: American Scientist, Vol. 88, No. 2 (MARCH-APRIL 2000), pp. 110-112 Published by: Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27857987 . Accessed: 27/02/2012 15:22
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The

Brutal

Ape

vs.

the

Sexy Ape?

Craig B. Stanford
or hundreds of years the apes have served as funhouse mirrors for what the human species once was, or perhaps might have been had evolution taken a different course. Among the four species of great apes, the chim panzees have received the lion's share of attention asmodels of early humanity. Until the 1960s, how ever,when JaneGoodall firstset out forTanzania, we didn't know much about wild chimpanzees. What Goodall found shocked us: Chimpanzees were not only extremely clever, they also had com plex societies and adept tool-using abilities, and they loved rawmeat. In thedecades that followed, field researchers observed other "human qualities" in wild chimpanzees: intercommunity warfare and lethal territorial aggression, cooperative huriting forothermammals (with the spoils of thehunt rit ually shared and used as the bargaining chips of political and sexual barter), and themanufacture and use of toolsmade of plant products and, at some sites, of stone! These studies turned our view of chimpanzees (and of ourselves) on itshead. That chimpanzees are not vegetarian pacifists came as a surprise in anthropological circleswhen Goodall first reported the chimps' omnivorous appetites. Some scholars even alleged that the lethal aggression seen during encounters between neighboring social groups was aberrant behavior, occurring only in animals disturbed by human contact. But as the field data accumulated itbe came clear that the brutal side of chimpanzees is quite real.Males strive to ascend a rigid domi nance hierarchy and on reaching high rankwield theirpolitical power in brutal ways. Sexual coer cion and beating of femaleswho do not submit to male desires are routine.Males patrol theperime ter of their territory,attacking and sometimes murdering theirunwary neighbors. Clrimpanzees at two study sites in Tanzania (Gombe National Park and Mahale National Park) were observed
an associate Craig Stanford is professor in theDepartment of a Anthropology and co-director of theJane Goodall Research Cen ter at the University of Southern California. Address: Depart ment of Anthropology, University of Southern California, 3502 Trousdale Parkway, Los Angeles, stanford@almaak. usc.edu Scientist, Volume 88 CA 90089-0032. Internet:

mate

to fission into two separate communities, after which the larger community in each case system atically exterminated the smaller community. Such "warfare" has been seen in only two pri
species, humans and chimpanzees.

are also efficient and ruthless Chimpanzees predators, consuming hundreds of prey ariimals includingmonkeys, antelope and wild pigs. Their attacks on their favoriteprey, the red colobus mon key, are brutal and dramatic. The hunts often in volve hand-to-hand combat between a chimp and a a match that is monkey, usually won by the Small-bodied cWmp. juveniles are killed by a bite to the neck, whereas adult monkeys are thrashed against the ground or a tree limb. The meat is dis tributed in Machiavellian fashion by high-ranking males who sharewith allies and kin, but withhold the prize from rivals. They also use meat to entice mate with them?an orgy of ovulating females to meat eating and sex straight out of Tom Jones.
The Make-Love-Not-War

Since the mid-1980s, the closely related, but only recently studied, bonobo has come to serve as an evolutionary counterpoint to the chimpanzee. They may look very much like chimpanzees? were once called pygmy chimpanzees?but they bonobos appear to be an ape of a different char acter. Studies of bonobos reveal a societymolded by cooperation, alliance formation and recre
ational sex "as social communication." As

Ape

of Emory University matologist puts it, "...[T]he high points of bonobo intellec tual life are found not in cooperative hunting or strategies to achieve dominance but in conflict resolution and sensitivity to others." Female bonobos band together in coalitions to dominate males, avoiding the sort of physical domination and sexual coercion that male chim on inflict their females. Such panzees routinely female coalitions are nearly unknown among chimpanzees, where the male bonds are the cause and consequence of everything from com munal hunting of small game to the fierce de fense of their territorialborders. Then there is the sex. Bonobos are often said to be, more than anything else, the sexy ape. They

Frans de Waal

pri

American

a mirror of humanity's Figure 1. The chimpanzee, er side? (Photographs courtesy of the author.)

dark

Figure should

2. The be?

bonobo,

a projection

of what

humanity

mate more often, inmore positions and with more recreational than procreational intent than any mammal other than Homo sapiens. Copula tion rates recorded by deWaal and Parish for cap tive bonobos in the San Diego Zoo and at the Yerkes Regional Primate Center in Atlanta are sky-high compared with such activities among wild chimpanzees. Bonobos also engage in fe male-female pairings, inwhich two females rub theirgenital swellings together ("GG nibbing" in the lexicon of bonobo researchers) to ease tensions between individuals. Male bonobos will also en gage in same-sex genital rubbing. Such same-sex bonding is absent in chimpanzee society. Relative to chimpanzees, bonobo society ap pears tobe sex oriented and "less dominated" by males. As de Waal states, "The chimpanzee re solves sexual issues with power; the bonobo re solves power issues with sex." An even more striking difference between fe male chimpanzees and bonobos is said to link the bonobos more closely to the human family tree. The females of nearly all mammalian species are reproductively active only during a constricted time period surrounding ovulation. This estrus period characterizes all of the higher primates, except human beings. Females of our species, although more likely to conceive around the time of ovulation, are freed from thebonds of a strictly defined period of "heat." The result is that sex serves not only forprocreation, but also as a mechanism of social communication and re inforcement of long-term pair bonds. Bonobo females are often said to be released from the bonds of estrus because theymaintain their sexual swellings for a much longer portion" of theirmenstrual cycles than chimpanzees do mate throughoutmuch of the cycle. and therefore Since female apes of either species show little in terest inmating except when they are swollen, this translates intomore sex for the bonobos. Be ing "released from estrus," bonobos have come touse sex as much forcommunicating with males as for conceiving offspring, as in our own species. In war as well as in romance, bonobos and chimpanzees appear to be strikingly different. When two bonobo communities meet at a range

boundary atWamba, a research site in the low land rain forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, bonobo researcher Takayoshi Kano ob served thatnot only is there no lethal aggression as sometimes occurs in chimps, there actually may be socializing and sex between females and the enemy community's males. When it comes tohunting and meat eating, we see a final striking contrast between bonobos and chimps. Bonobos catchmonkeys in their rainfor est habitat almost as well as chimpanzees do, but they don't seem to know what to do with them. Bonobos capture baby monkeys and then use them as dolls or playthings forhours, only to re lease themonkey unharmed (though worse for thewear) when they become bored with them. It's as if the protein and fat value of the prey hasn't dawned on their kinder, gentler nature. Held Captive to Sex? real are these distinctions between chim panzees and bonobos? Captive bonobos are in far exceeding their chim deed hypersexual, panzee kin in both the quantity and quality of their sexual couplings, but whether this accu an rately reflects thebehavior ofwild bonobos is other question. Many of the stark behavioral con trasts are based on comparisons between wild chimpanzees and captive bonobos. Most of the available bonobo data come from captive groups in the San Diego Zoo and at Yerkes. Animals in captive settings are known for their tendency to display greater frequencies of various social be wild counterparts. haviors compared to their, There is often not much else to do in captivity, where animals have no need to spend their day foraging for food. Their behavior patterns do not necessarily reflect those that evolved for living in an African forest. So we should more appropriately turn to studies ofwild bonobo populations. Although much less studied than diimps, we know about naturalistic patterns of bonobos from two long-term study sites in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: Wamba, the site directed by Kano, and Lomako, which has been occupied by two separate research teams from theUnited States and Germany. How
2000 March-April 111

The field data show that in two important re spects, female bonobos are not more sexual than their chimpanzee counterparts. First, there is no difference in frequency of copulations when wild bonobos from Wamba are compared with wild at Tanzanian site, Gombe or Ma either chimps hale. Second, the idea that bonobo females are released from estrus results fromdata on the du ration of sexual swelling takenmainly from ani maintain their sexual mals at Yerkes, where they swelling for 23 days, nearly half of their 49-day cycle (in captivity). This dwarfs the receptive pe riod of wild female chimpanzees fromGombe, who swell forabout 13 days of their36-day cycle. we consider wild bono The equation changes if bos rather than captive specimens, whose excel lentnutrition may produce earlier menarche and ratcheted-up reproductive cycling. Bonobos from Wamba in the Congo are swollen for only 13 a of days 33-day cycle, numbers that are much closer to those ofwild chimpanzees. A recent re port about bonobos in theAntwerp Zoo shows that even in captivity, bonobos do not necessarily than chim have longer swelling durations estrus The release from that is panzees. supposed said to characterize bonobos has been overstated because the data are based on captive animals. Other aspects of bonobo behavior bear a sec ond look as well. Female bonobos, it is true, are often dominant to males, but thisdomination oc curs in only two settings,when either food or sex is involved. A male often gets sex by acceding to a female's desire to feed and somight be thought of as strategically submissive in select situations. Cleverness through subordination is certainly not unknown in other primate societies. And are bonobos entirely peace-loving? About half of all themtercommunity encounters seen by Kano's team involved aggression of some sort.The difference between chimpanzee aggression and bonobo aggression is thatbonobo attacks and in juries are often directed by females atmales, rather than the reverse as in chimpanzees. There are even reports from zoos of female bonobos brutalizing a male so badly thathis penis was severed. Meat eating, while certainly less common among bonobos than among chimpanzees, may be under reported because bonobos are so little studied. Barbara Fruth and Gottfried Hohmann Max Planck Institute forEvolutionary An of the thropology in Leipzig have observed extensive meat eating and meat sharing by bonobos at Lo mako, but most "chimp-ologists" still refer to the bonobo as the "vegetarian" great ape. Mirrors or Projections? In recent years, some anthropologists have placed human beings at an evolutionary crossroads. One path leads to a chimpanzee-like world of male brutality and violence, where might makes right, and subordinates must grovel to avoid a beating. The other path leads to a kinder, gentler vision of humanity, one inwhich violence is not strength,
American Scientist, Volume 88

and compassionate bonding is not weakness. It's not Camelot; it's bonobo society. This starkly black-and-white view of the two apes has become well entrenched in the public mind and in the mind's eye of many behavioral scientists. Sexy apes versus brutal ones represents a dichotomy that appeals to us?our possible evolutionary paths laid out inplain and simple terms. The popular view, however, may have more to do with ideology than science. There is cur rently a trendy caricature of the human male and female as being so distinct fromone another as to are from Mars" be fromdifferent planets?"men and "women are fromVenus," the saying goes. Such notions are fine in a pop-culture setting,but do they serve us well in science? Are we project ing such simple conceptions a littlebit toomuch on our primate cousins? Itwouldn't be the first time that idealized no tions of ourselves have influenced the interpreta tion of data among evolutionary biologists. In the 1960s, the brotherhood of predominantly male anthropologists foisted "Man theHunter" on stu dents and the public alike, arguing that the male role of bringing home the bacon accounted for the rapid expansion of the human brain inhomi nid evolution. Itwasn't until several years later that female anthropologists weighed inwith the reminder that something had to account for ex pansion ofwomen's brains in the course of our species' evolution. Such lessons remind us that we would do well to consider how our depic tions of primate societies may become inter twined with our own political views.
de Waal, and F Lanting. 1997. Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stanford, C. B. 1999. The Hunting Apes. Princeton: Princeton University Press. of chimpanzees Stanford, C. B. 1998. The social behavior and bonobos: Empirical evidence and shifting assump tions. Current Anthropology 39:399-420. F. B.M,

Bibliography

"...and

do you take Jane, knowing it's gonna be hell for some university to hire you both?"