• DOI:10.1086/204757
• Corpus ID: 8452514

The Social Behavior of Chimpanzees and Bonobos: Empirical Evidence and Shifting Assumptions1

@article{Stanford1998TheSB,
  title={The Social Behavior of Chimpanzees and Bonobos: Empirical Evidence and Shifting Assumptions1},
  author={Craig B. Stanford},
  journal={Current Anthropology},
  year={1998},
  volume={39},
  pages={399 - 420}
}

• C. Stanford
• Published 1 August 1998
• Psychology
• Current Anthropology

As our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos have been widely used as models of the behavior of early hominids. In recent years, as information on the social behavior and ecology of bonobos has come to light, many interspecific comparisons have been made. Chimpanzees have been characterized in terms of their intercommunity warfare, meat eating, infanticide, cannibalism, male status‐striving, and dominance over females. Bonobos, meanwhile, have been portrayed as the “Make love, not war” ape, characterized by female power‐sharing, a lack of aggression between either individuals or groups, richly elaborated sexual behavior that occurs without the constraint of a narrow window of fertility, and the use of sex for communicative purposes. This paper evaluates the evidence for this dichotomy and considers the reasons that contrasting portrayals of the two great apes have developed. While there are marked differences in social behavior between these two species, I argue that they are more similar behaviorally than most accounts have suggested. I discuss several reasons that current views of bonobo and chimpanzee societies may not accord well with field data. Among these are a bias toward captive data on bonobos, the tendency to see bonobos as derived because their behavior has been described more recently than that of chimpanzees, and the possibility that interpretations of bonobo‐chimpanzee differences are reflections of human male‐female differences.