Comparing Social Behavior of Bonobos and Chimpanzees; and Their Effect on Social Human Characteristics.

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Introduction As our closest living ancestors, bonobos (Pan Americus) and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) have often been used as an ancestral model to study social and cultural hominoid behavior. Chimpanzees and Bonobos' DNA differs only 1% from humans yet their social behavior is very primitive and different compared to humans. Molecular studies indicate that humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos are very closely related in a lineage that split into hominid and Pan lines approximately 6-7 million years ago, possibly following a divergence from the gorilla lineage about 1– 2 million years earlier (Caccone and Powell, 1989). Chimpanzees are great apes, under the Homo lineage, that have been known for their male dominant, meat eating and generally violent culture. Meanwhile bonobos, also great apes, are on a completely different behavior spectrum, they are a female dominant, more peaceful, and heavily sexually oriented society. "Chimpanzees and bonobos provide us with examples of the range of possible adaptations for feeding, ranging, territoriality, mating, offspring rearing, and a variety of other behaviors without which there would be no starting point for reconstructing Hominid societies" (Stanford, 400). In this paper I compare and contrast differences in behaviors of chimpanzees and bonobos and argue that their behavior reconstructed behavior in ancestral humans. On the tree of life, different branches are often occupied by species that look poles apart but sometimes what separates species is more social than physical, as occurs in chimpanzees and bonobos. Chimpanzees exhibit social behavior that mimics humans such as social structure, nest-building, usage of tools, communication and acute intelligence. Chimpanzees and bonobos live in similar jungles in equatorial Africa near the Republic of Congo. They look alike (except for a few minute differences such a

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