Understanding Society
More on Chimpanzees
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Newt Gingrich once recommended Frans de Waal’s Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes to congressional Republicans, seeing Washington reflected in chimpanzee hierarchy. Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History directs Doug toward a different relative: the bonobo. Females band together against aggressive males, shifting the balance of power and gaining the freedom to choose gentler mates.
A Note on the Original Text
Doug’s writings are presented as originally written. Spelling, punctuation, and grammatical irregularities have been retained to preserve his words and the integrity of the original record.
ORIGINAL WRITING
The content in this post is based on the book Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
“Scientists have known for decades that we share 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees. In 1995 this inspired Newt Gingrich, then speaker of the House of Representatives, to hand out dozens of copies of de Waal’s book to his colleagues. The US congress was, to his mind, not much different from a chimpanzee colony. At best, its members exercised a little more effort to hide their instincts.
What was not yet widely known at that time is that humans have another close primate relative that shares 99% of our DNA, the bonobo. The first time Franz de Waal saw one was back in the early seventies, when they were still known as ‘pygmy chimpanzees.’ For a long time chimps and bonobos were thought to be the even same species.
In reality, bonobos are an altogether different species. These apes have domesticated themselves, just like Homo puppy. The females of the species seems to have been key to this process, because, while not as strong as the males, they close ranks any time one of their sex gets harassed by the opposite sex. If necessary, they bite his penis in half. Thanks to this balance of power, bonobo females can pick and choose their own mates, and the nicest guys usually finish first.
(If you think all this emancipation makes for a dull sex life, think again: ‘Bonobos behave as if they have read the Kama Sutra,’ writes de Waal ‘performing every position and variation one can imagine.’ When two groups of bonobos meet for the first time, it Otten ends in an orgy.)