Bonobo sex and society

These apes supposedly have inordinate amounts of sex and never fight. Can this appealing story really be true? Reputation: Bonobos are miniature, sharing, caring chimps, living in hippie communes with no aggression and lots of sex. Reality: Not really. Bonobos are roughly the same size as chimps, can be aggressive and use sex in very specific contexts. Bonobos Pan paniscus used to be known as "pygmy chimpanzees", a designation that served to distinguish them from regular chimps Pan troglodytes.

Here's how to inoculate ourselves against negative ones. Verified by Psychology Today. Sex at Dawn. A few days ago, the lovely Cara Santa Maria, a neuroscientist and editor at Huffington Post, asked me if I could come up with seven things we could learn about love from bonobos, for a Valentine's Day piece :. As the great primatologist, Frans de Waal put it, "Chimps use violence to get sex, while bonobos use sex to avoid violence. As James Prescott demonstrated in a meta-analysis of all available anthropological data, the connection between less restrictive sexuality and less conflict generally holds true for human societies as well.

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This segment from Evolution: "Why Sex? Although they are close relatives, chimps and bonobos have strikingly different social dynamics: chimps society is prone to violence, and bonobos are relatively peaceful. One theory suggests that a small change in the availability of food may have encouraged the evolution of today's chimp and bonobo societies. Researchers Richard Wrangham and Amy Parish comment on the group dynamics of the two species. All rights reserved.