DON’T be fooled by their reputation for free love and sex. Bonobos hunt and kill other animals just like their more vicious chimpanzee cousins.
Some anthropologists have suggested that bonobos lost their appetite for violence in the million or so years since they split from chimps. But Gottfried Hohmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, witnessed “merciless” bonobos hunting monkeys and antelope in the Salonga National Park, Democratic Republic of the Congo. “They catch [the animal] and start eating it. They don’t bother to kill it,” he says. Hohmann witnessed a particularly gruesome hunt of forest antelope, or duikers. One duiker was still alive when “the bonobos opened the stomach and intestines”, says Hohmann (Current Biology, ).
In three other hunts that Hohmann and colleague Martin Surbeck observed, bonobos used a team approach to hunt monkeys in a nearby tree. They sneak under the tree first, he says, then “it’s a sudden rush” up into the branches.
Advertisement
Yet unlike chimps, bonobos live in a female-centred society where sex, not aggression, settles differences and enforces social order. The discovery casts doubt on claims that social aggression and hunting go hand in hand, Hohmann says.
