The Similarities Between Bonobos And Chimpanzees

Bonobos and chimpanzees are both similar primates with relations to today’s modern humans. Chimpanzees are more similar to modern humans making them the better models of our earliest human ancestors both morphologically and behaviorally.

Bonobos are a species that use sexual behavior as the key to social life. In most other species, chimpanzees or humans, sexual behavior is a fairly distinct category. Despite this sexual behavior, the bonobo’s rate of reproduction is the same as that of a chimpanzee. A female gives birth to a single infant at intervals of five years, sharing this characteristic with chimpanzees of partial separation between sex and reproduction. Humans have a different rate of reproduction in that they give birth to 1-2 infants within a three-year period and raise them together. Although humans rate of reproduction is different, and adapted to raise children simultaneously, than both of these primates their sexual behavior is most similar to that of chimpanzees.

Chimpanzee’s had to adapt to relatively open hot and dry habitats while there is evidence that bonobo’s never have left the protection of the trees along the cool Zaire river.

If this is true, the bonobo may most closely resemble the common ancestor of all three modern species, chimpanzees, modern humans, bonobos, suggesting that the bonobo might not be a good model for the earliest human ancestors. This also supports the evidence of chimpanzee’s adapting and becoming more bipedal like our human ancestors. Bipedal locomotion helps animals living in hot climates, like the chimpanzee, to stay cool by reducing the amount of sunlight that falls on the body by increasing the animal’s exposure to air movements and by immersing the animal in lower air temperature. Chimpanzees sometimes stand on their two hind legs as they harvest fruit from trees. This bipedal adaptation in chimpanzees is evident in modern

humans.
Fruit and foraging are the central diets of both wild bonobos and chimpanzees. Whereas chimpanzees use a wide range of techniques and strategies to obtain goods – from cracking nuts with stone tools to fishing in termite holes with sticks - among bonobos tool use seems undeveloped. This example shows that chimpanzees act more like modern humans behaviorally and have adapted to obtaining their food.
In chimpanzee groups the strongest bonds are established between the males in order to hunt and to protect their shared territory. The female chimpanzees live in overlapping home ranges within the territory and are not bonded to any one male. This is similar to modern humans where males unite for cooperative ventures and females bond with those of their own sex. This is dissimilar to bonobos where the strongest social bonds are among females who also bond with males but the female is the most important member in their groups and a male’s status depends on that of his mothers’.
Bonobo’s are incurably playful and like to make faces, sometimes in long solitary expressions and at other times, while tickling one another. Bonobos are more controlled in expressing their emotions, than are the extroverted chimpanzees. Chimpanzees often engage in spectacular charging displays in which they show off their strength breaking branches and uprooting small trees. Bonobos on the other hand usually limit displays to a brief run while dragging some branches. In this example bonobos, humans and chimpanzees all share some of the same qualities. But, I would argue that today’s modern humans are more like the chimpanzee, being extroverted, because millennials share all information about their personal lives in the social media environment.