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The Brutal Ape vs. the Sexy Ape?Author(s): Craig B. StanfordReviewed work(s):Source: American Scientist, Vol. 88, No. 2 (MARCH-APRIL 2000), pp. 110-112Published by: Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27857987 .

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The Brutal Ape vs. the Sexy Ape?

Craig B. Stanford

orhundreds ofyears theapes have served as

funhouse mirrors forwhat the human

species once was, or perhaps might havebeen had evolution taken a different course.

Among the four species of great apes, the chim

panzees have received the lion's share of attentionasmodels of early humanity.Until the 1960s,how

ever,when JaneGoodall first et out forTanzania,we didn't know much about wild chimpanzees.What Goodall found shocked us: Chimpanzeeswere not only extremely clever, theyalso had com

plex societies and adept tool-using abilities, and

they loved rawmeat. In thedecades thatfollowed,fieldresearchers observed other "human qualities"inwild chimpanzees: intercommunity arfare andlethal territorialaggression, cooperative huritingfor thermammals (with the spoils of thehunt rit

ually shared and used as thebargaining chips of

political and sexual barter), and themanufactureand use of tools made of plant products and, atsome sites,of stone!These studies turnedour view

of chimpanzees (and of ourselves) on itshead.That chimpanzees are not vegetarian pacifists

came as a surprise inanthropological circleswhenGoodall firstreported the chimps' omnivorous

appetites. Some scholars even alleged that thelethal aggression seen during encounters between

neighboring social groups was aberrant behavior,

occurring only in animals disturbed by humancontact. But as the field data accumulated itbecame clear that thebrutal side of chimpanzees is

quite real. Males strive to ascend a rigid dominance hierarchy and on reaching high rankwieldtheirpolitical power inbrutalways. Sexual coercion and beating of femaleswho do not submit to

male desires are routine.Males patrol theperimeter of their territory, ttacking and sometimes

murdering theirunwary neighbors. Clrimpanzeesat two study sites inTanzania (Gombe NationalPark andMahale National Park) were observed

Craig Stanford is an associate professor in theDepartment of

Anthropology and a co-director of theJaneGoodall Research Cen

ter at theUniversity of Southern California. Address: Department ofAnthropology, University of Southern California, 3502

Trousdale Parkway, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0032. Internet:

stanford@almaak. usc.edu

to fission into two separate communities, afterwhich the larger community ineach case systematically exterminated the smaller community.Such "warfare" has been seen in only two pri

mate species, humans andchimpanzees.

Chimpanzees are also efficient and ruthless

predators, consuming hundreds of prey ariimals

includingmonkeys, antelope andwild pigs. Theirattacks on their favoriteprey, the red colobusmon

key, are brutal and dramatic. The hunts often involve hand-to-hand combat between a chimp anda monkey, amatch that is usually won by the

cWmp. Small-bodied juveniles are killed by a biteto theneck,whereas adultmonkeys are thrashed

against theground or a tree limb.Themeat isdistributed inMachiavellian fashion by high-ranking

males who sharewith allies and kin,butwithholdtheprize fromrivals.They also use meat toentice

ovulating females tomate with them?an orgy ofmeat eating and sex straightout ofTomJones.

The Make-Love-Not-War ApeSince themid-1980s, the closely related, but onlyrecently studied, bonobo has come to serve as an

evolutionary counterpoint to the chimpanzee.They may look very much like chimpanzees?theywere once called pygmy chimpanzees?butbonobos appear tobe an ape of a differentcharacter. Studies ofbonobos reveal a societymolded

by cooperation, alliance formation and recreational sex "as social communication." As

pri

matologist Frans deWaal of Emory Universityputs it,"...[T]he high points of bonobo intellectual lifeare found not in cooperative hunting or

strategies to achieve dominance but in conflict

resolution and sensitivity toothers."Female bonobos band together in coalitions todominate males, avoiding the sort of physicaldomination and sexual coercion thatmale chim

panzees routinely inflicton their females. Suchfemale coalitions are nearly unknown among

chimpanzees, where themale bonds are thecause and consequence of everything fromcom

munal hunting of small game to the fierce defense of their territorialborders.

Then there is the sex. Bonobos are often said to

be,more than anything else, the sexy ape. They

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Figure 1. The chimpanzee, amirror of humanity's dark

er side? (Photographs courtesy of the author.)

mate more often, inmore positions and withmore recreational than procreational intent than

any mammal other thanHomo sapiens. Copulation rates recorded by de Waal and Parish forcaptive bonobos in the San

DiegoZoo and at the

Yerkes Regional Primate Center inAtlanta are

sky-high compared with such activities amongwild chimpanzees. Bonobos also engage in female-female pairings, inwhich two females rub

theirgenital swellings together ("GG nibbing" in

the lexicon ofbonobo researchers) toease tensionsbetween individuals. Male bonobos will also en

gage in same-sex genital rubbing. Such same-sex

bonding is absent inchimpanzee society.Relative to chimpanzees, bonobo society ap

pears tobe sex oriented and "less dominated" bymales. 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 female chimpanzees and bonobos is said to linkthe bonobos more closely to thehuman familytree. The females of nearly all mammalian

species are reproductively active only during a

constricted time period surrounding ovulation.

This estrus period characterizes all of thehigherprimates, except human beings. Females of our

species, although more likely to conceive around

the time of ovulation, are freed from thebonds ofa strictlydefined period of "heat." The result isthat sex serves not only forprocreation, but alsoas amechanism of social communication and re

inforcementof long-term pair bonds.

Bonobo females are often said to be releasedfrom the bonds of estrus because theymaintain

their sexual swellings foramuch longer portion"of theirmenstrual cycles than chimpanzees do

and thereforemate throughoutmuch of thecycle.Since female apes of either species show little interest inmating except when they are swollen,this translates intomore sex for the bonobos. Be

ing "released from estrus," bonobos have come

touse sex asmuch forcommunicating with malesas forconceiving offspring,as inour own species.

Inwar as well as in romance, bonobos and

chimpanzees appear to be strikingly different.When two bonobo communities meet at a range

Figure 2. The bonobo, a projection of what humanityshould be?

boundary atWamba, a research site in the lowland rain forests of theDemocratic Republic of

Congo, bonobo researcher Takayoshi Kano ob

served thatnot only is thereno lethal aggressionas sometimes occurs in

chimps,there

actuallymay be socializing and sex between females and

the enemy community's males.When itcomes tohunting andmeat eating,we

see a final strikingcontrastbetween bonobos and

chimps. Bonobos catchmonkeys in their rainforest habitat almost aswell as chimpanzees do, but

theydon't seem toknow what todo with them.Bonobos capture baby monkeys and then use

them as dolls or playthings forhours, only to re

lease themonkey unharmed (thoughworse for

thewear) when theybecome bored with them.It's as if the protein and fat value of the preyhasn't dawned on theirkinder, gentler nature.

Held Captive to Sex?How real are these distinctions between chim

panzees and bonobos? Captive bonobos are in

deed hypersexual, far exceeding their chim

panzee kin in both the quantity and quality of

their sexual couplings, but whether this accu

rately reflects thebehavior ofwild bonobos isan

other question. Many of the stark behavioral con

trasts are based on comparisons between wild

chimpanzees and captive bonobos. Most of theavailable bonobo data come fromcaptive groupsin the San Diego Zoo and at Yerkes. Animals in

captive settings are known for their tendency to

display greater frequencies of various social be

haviors compared to their,wild counterparts.There is often not much else to do in captivity,where animals have no need to spend theirday

foraging for food. Their behavior patterns do not

necessarily reflect those that evolved for livingin anAfrican forest.

Sowe shouldmore appropriately turn to studies

ofwild bonobo populations. Although much less

studied thandiimps, we know about naturalistic

patterns of bonobos from two long-term studysites in theDemocratic Republic of theCongo:

Wamba, the site directed by Kano, and Lomako,which has been occupied by two separate researchteams fromtheUnited States and Germany.

2000 March-April 111

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The field data show that in two important re

spects, female bonobos are notmore sexual thantheir chimpanzee counterparts. First, there isno

difference in frequency of copulations when wildbonobos fromWamba are compared with wild

chimps at either Tanzanian site,Gombe orMahale. Second, the idea thatbonobo females are

released fromestrus results fromdata on the duration of sexual swelling takenmainly fromanimals atYerkes, where theymaintain their sexual

swelling for23 days, nearly half of their49-daycycle (in captivity). This dwarfs the receptive period ofwild female chimpanzees fromGombe,

who swell for bout 13days of their36-day cycle.The equation changes if e consider wild bonobos rather than captive specimens, whose excellentnutritionmay produce earlier menarche and

ratcheted-up reproductive cycling.Bonobos fromWamba in the Congo are swollen for only 13

days of a 33-day cycle, numbers that aremuchcloser to those ofwild chimpanzees. A recent re

portabout bonobos in the

AntwerpZoo shows

thateven in captivity,bonobos do not necessarilyhave longer swelling durations than chim

panzees. The supposed release fromestrus that issaid to characterize bonobos has been overstatedbecause thedata are based on captive animals.

Other aspects of bonobo behavior bear a sec

ond look aswell. Female bonobos, it is true, are

often dominant tomales, but thisdomination occurs inonly two settings,when either food or sexis involved. A male often gets sex by acceding toa female's desire to feed and somight be thoughtof as strategically submissive in select situations.Cleverness through subordination is certainlynotunknown inother

primatesocieties.

And are bonobos entirely peace-loving? Abouthalf of all themtercommunity encounters seen byKano's team involved aggression of some sort.Thedifference between chimpanzee aggression andbonobo aggression is thatbonobo attacks and in

juriesare often directed by females atmales, ratherthan thereverse as inchimpanzees. There are even

reports fromzoos of female bonobos brutalizing a

male so badly thathis penis was severed.Meat eating, while certainly less common

among bonobos than among chimpanzees, maybe under reported because bonobos are so littlestudied. Barbara Fruth and Gottfried Hohmannof theMax Planck Institute forEvolutionary An

thropology in Leipzig have observed extensivemeat eating and meat sharing by bonobos at Lo

mako, butmost "chimp-ologists" still referto thebonobo as the "vegetarian" great ape.

Mirrors or Projections?In recentyears, some anthropologists have placedhuman 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 toavoid a beating.The other path leads to a kinder, gentler vision of

humanity, one inwhich violence isnot strength,

American Scientist, Volume 88

and compassionate bonding isnotweakness. It'snot Camelot; it's bonobo society. This starklyblack-and-white view of the two apes has becomewell entrenched in the public mind and in themind's eye ofmany behavioral scientists. Sexyapes versus brutal ones represents a dichotomythat 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

rentlya trendycaricature of the human male andfemale as being so distinct fromone another as tobe from differentplanets?"men are fromMars"and "women are fromVenus," the saying goes.Such notions are fine ina pop-culture setting,butdo they serve us well in science? Are we projecting such simple conceptions a littlebit toomuchon our primate cousins?

Itwouldn't be the firsttime that idealized no

tions of ourselves have influenced the interpretationof data among evolutionary biologists. In the

1960s, the brotherhood of predominantly maleanthropologists foisted "Man theHunter" on stu

dents and thepublic alike, arguing that themalerole of bringing home the bacon accounted forthe rapid expansion of the human brain inhominid evolution. Itwasn't until several years laterthat female anthropologists weighed inwith thereminder that something had to account forex

pansion ofwomen's brains in the course of our

species' evolution. Such lessons remind us thatwe would do well to consider how our depictions of primate societies may become intertwinedwith our own political views.

Bibliographyde Waal, F. B.M, and F Lanting. 1997. Bonobo: The Forgotten

Ape. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Stanford, C. B. 1999. The Hunting Apes. Princeton: Princeton

University Press.

Stanford, C. B. 1998. The social behavior of chimpanzeesand bonobos: Empirical evidence and shifting assumptions. Current Anthropology 39:399-420.

"...and do you take Jane, knowing it'sgonna be hell

forsome university to hire you both?"