“Bonobos, the ‘hippie chimps,’ might not be so mellow after all. Male bonobos are about three times as likely as chimps to engage in aggressive behavior—pushing, hitting, and biting,” reports Science. “Overall, male bonobos turned out to be about three times as likely as chimps to engage in aggressive behavior. Although none of the encounters were lethal—and the team didn’t track the severity of injuries—bonobos weren’t afraid to push, hit, and bite their foes. Their aggression didn’t appear to be a turn-off for female bonobos, who actually preferred to mate with aggressive males.”
Bonobos have long been depicted as peaceful because of their matriarchal nature. “Bonobos are a matriarchal species, meaning that females are in charge of the group.”
But matriarchy doesn’t mean peace. The Iroquois were closer to being matriarchal than other peoples, but this did not stop them from largely exterminating the Huron nation, nor did it keep them from publicly torturing to death countless people they captured.
As The New York Times explained in 2016,
The bonobo is a sister species to the more widespread common chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes, and the two share equal footing as our nearest primate kin.
Yet the apes have followed distinctly different behavioral paths. Chimpanzee society is male-dominated and features strong bonds between adult males and feeble ties between females.
In the bonobo world, by contrast, female camaraderie prevails, while the bonds between males are weak. “It’s a matriarchy,” said Amy Parish, a primatologist at the University of Southern California. “Females are running the show.”
Female bonobos can also be quite violent, explains The Times, describing how female bonobos attacked an alpha male bonobo and bit off the tip of his toe:
Suddenly, three older, high-ranking female bonobos bolted up from below…The males scattered. The females pursued them…Screams on all sides grew deafening.
Three of the males escaped, but the females cornered and grabbed the fourth one — the resident alpha male. He was healthy, muscular and about 18 pounds heavier than any of his captors. But no matter.
The females bit into him as he howled and struggled to pull free. Finally, “he dropped from the tree and ran away, and he didn’t appear again for about three weeks,” said Nahoko Tokuyama, of the Primate Research Institute, who witnessed the encounter. When the male returned, he kept to himself. Dr. Tokuyama noticed that the tip of one of his toes was gone.
“Being hated by females,” she said in an email interview, “is a big matter for male bonobos.”
In good news for bonobos, their population has stabilized in the one country where they are still found in the wild, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where around 25,000 of them live.
