This theory posits that the abundant ground vegetation in the bonobo territory provided easy access to year-round food without competition from other individuals. Chimpanzees, however, tend to act more aggressively when encountering other chimpanzee groups and may even have violent exchanges that include fatalities.Ī leading hypothesis suggests that different feeding ecologies were key to the behavioral divergence between the two species. Bonobos are also known for using sexual behaviors to defuse tension-including same-sex behaviors among females. When bonobos encounter other bonobo groups they generally interact peacefully. While bonobos organize into female-led societies, chimpanzees are patriarchal. Their behavioral differences are much more distinct. Diet key to bonobo-chimp divergence?īonobos and chimps closely resemble one another physically and they were not recognized as separate species until the 1930s. Populations of chimpanzees, also an endangered species, are found in a forested belt north of the Congo River and scattered in a few other areas of west and central Africa. You can’t help but recognize the similarity in behaviors to humans.” When the mothers tried to wean them, they would sometimes throw tantrums and scream and run around. “It was fun to observe the juveniles twirling around in the trees, chasing one another, and trying to pull each other down. “Bonobos are well-known for being playful, even as adults,” Kovalaskas says. Wild bonobos, an endangered species, are only found in forests south of the Congo River in the DRC. Sarah Kovalaskas, an Emory graduate student of anthropology and first author of the paper, spent nine months in the field, studying the social development of juvenile bonobos in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). “Understanding the physiological mechanisms underlying the differences in chimpanzee and bonobo behaviors-particularly the much stronger propensity of bonobos toward conflict resolution instead of fighting-may also give us information about the genes underlying our own behaviors,” Lindo says. The two species share around 99% of human DNA, making them our closest living relatives in the animal kingdom. “Chimpanzees and bonobos are fascinating because they are very, very closely linked genetically but they have huge behavioral differences,” says Lindo, senior author of the study in Genes, Brain and Behavior.
“We contrasted the genomes of both species to understand how natural selection has shaped differences between the two closely related primates.” “Our paper is the first whole-genome positive selection scan between chimpanzees and bonobos,” says John Lindo, assistant professor of anthropology at Emory University and a geneticist specialized in ancient DNA and natural selection. A whole-genome comparison of bonobos and chimps reveals the gene pathways associated with the striking differences between the two species’ diets, sociality, and sexual behaviors.Ĭhimpanzees and bonobos, sister species that diverged around 1.8 million years ago as the Congo River formed a geographic boundary, evolved in separate environments.
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