Swingers - The New Yorker

2/9/22, 3:03 PM S inge The Ne Yo ke
O F -F C J 30, 2007 I
B b a e ce eb a ed a eace- i g, a ia cha , a d e a ibe a ed. A e

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B Ian Pa ke
J 23, 2007
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n a Saturda e ening a fe months ago, a fund-raiser as held in a do nto n Manhattan
oga studio to bene t the bonobo, a species of African ape that is er similar to but, some
sa , far nicer than the chimpan ee. A er for the e ent depicted a bonobo sitting in the crook of a
tree, a superimposed guitar in its left hand, alongside the message Sa e the Hippie Chimps An
audience of oung, shoeless people sat cross-legged on a polished ooden oor, listening to Indian-
accented music and eating snacks prepared b Bonobo s, a restaurant on T ent -third Street that
ser es ra egetarian food. According to the restaurant s take-out menu, Wild bonobos are happ ,
pleasure-lo ing creatures hose lifest le is dictated b instinct and Mother Nature.
h p :// .ne o ke .com/maga ine/2007/07/30/ inge 1/29

Af - ea - d fe a e b b .B b ha e bee ec g i ed a a ecie f e ha a
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The e ent as arranged b the Bonobo Conser ation Initiati e, an organi ation based in
Washington, D.C., hich orks in the Democratic Republic of Congo to protect bonobo habitats
and to combat illegal trading in bush meat. Sall Je ell Co e, the groups founder and president,
stood to make a short presentation. She sho ed slides of bonobos, including one captioned
, and said that the apes, hich she described as bise ual, engaged in arious kinds of
se ual acti it in order to defuse con ict and maintain a tranquil societ . There as applause.

Bonobos are into peace and lo e and harmon , Co e said, then joked, The might e en ha e been
the rst ape to disco er marijuana. Images of bonobos ere projected onto the all behind her: the
looked like chimpan ees but had longer hair, atter faces, pinker lips, smaller ears, narro er bodies,
and, one might sa , more gra itas a chimpan ee s arched bro looks goof , but a bonobo s lo ,
straight bro sets the face in hat is eas to read as earnest contemplati eness.
I spoke to a tall man in his forties ho ent b the single name Wind, and ho had dri en from his
home in North Carolina to sing at the e ent. He as a musician and a former practitioner of
metaph sical counselling, hich he also referred to as clair o ance. He said that he had
encountered bonobos a fe ears ago at Georgia State Uni ersit , at the in itation of Sue Sa age-
Rumbaugh, a primatologist kno n for e periments that test the language-learning abilities of
bonobos. (During one of Wind s se eral isits to G.S.U., Peter Gabriel, the British pop star, as also
there; Gabriel pla ed a ke board, another ke board as put in front of a bonobo, and Wind pla ed
utes and a small drum.) Bonobos are remarkable, Wind told me, for being capable of unconditional
lo e. The ere tolerant, patient, forgi ing, and supporti e of one another. Chimps, b contrast,
led brutish li es of aggression, ego, and plotting. As for humans, the had some innate stock of
bonobo temperament, but the too often beha ed like chimps. (The chimp-bonobo di ision is
strongl felt b de otees of the latter. Wind told me that he once ore a chimpan ee T-shirt to a
bonobo e ent, and got shit for it. )
It as Wind s turn to perform. Help Gaia and Gaia ill help ou, he chanted into a microphone, in
a booming oice that made people jump. Help bonobo and bonobo ill help ou.
I
n recent ears, the bonobo has found a strange niche in the popular imagination, based largel on
its reputation for peacefulness and promiscuit . The Washington P recentl described the
species as copulating incessantl ; the Ti e claimed that the bonobo stands out from the chest-
thumping masses as an e ample of amicabilit , sensiti it and, ell, humaneness ; a PBS ildlife lm
began ith the ords Where chimpan ees ght and murder, bonobos are peacemakers. And, unlike
chimps, it s not the bonobo males but the females ho ha e the po er. The Kinse Institute claims
on its Web site that e er bonobo female, male, infant, high or lo status seeks and responds to
kisses. And, in Los Angeles, a se ad iser named Susan Block promotes hat she calls The Bonobo
Wa on public-access tele ision. (In brief: Pleasure eases pain; good se defuses tension; lo e lessens
iolence; ou cant er ell ght a ar hile ou re ha ing an orgasm. ) In ne spaper columns and
on the Internet, bonobos are routinel described as creatures that shun iolence and li e in egalitarian
or female-dominated communities; more rarel , the are said to a oid meat. These beha iors are
thought to be someho linked to their unquenchable se ual appetites, often e pressed in the
missionar position. And because the bonobo is the closest relati e of humans, its comportment is
said to instruct us in the fundamentals of human nature. To underscore the bonobo s status as a
signpost species a guide to human irtue, or at least modern dating it is said to alk upright. (The
Enc clop dia Britannica depicts the species in a bipedal pose, like a chimpan ee in a sitcom.)
This pop image of the bonobo equal parts dolphin, Dalai Lama, and Warren Beatt has
ourished largel in the absence of the animal itself, hich as recogni ed as a species less than a
centur ago. T o hundred or so bonobos are kept in capti it around the orld; but, despite being
one of just four species of great ape, along ith orangutans, gorillas, and chimpan ees, the ild
bonobo has recei ed comparati el little scienti c scrutin . It is one of the oddities of the bonobo
orld and a source of frustration to some that Frans de Waal, of Emor Uni ersit , the high-
pro le Dutch primatologist and riter, ho is the most frequentl quoted authorit on the species,
has ne er seen a ild bonobo.
Attempts to stud bonobos in their habitat began onl in the nineteen-se enties, and those e orts
ha e al a s been intermittent, because of geograph and politics. Wild bonobos, hich are
endangered (estimates of their number range from si thousand to a hundred thousand), keep
themsel es out of ie , in dense and inaccessible rain forests, and onl in the Democratic Republic of
Congo, here, in the past decade, more than three million people ha e died in ci il and regional
con icts. For se eral ears around the turn of the millennium, hen ghting in Congo as at its most
intense, eld obser ation of bonobos came to a halt.
In recent ears, ho e er, some Congolese and o erseas obser ers ha e returned to the forest, and to
the hot, damp ork of sneaking up on reticent apes. The most prominent scientist among them is
Gottfried Hohmann, a research associate at the Ma Planck Institute for E olutionar Anthropolog ,
in Leip ig, German . He has been isiting Congo o and on since 1989. When I rst called
Hohmann, t o ears ago, he didnt immediatel embrace the idea of taking a reporter on a eld trip.
But e continued to talk, and in the eek after attending the bonobo fund-raiser in Ne York I e

to meet Hohmann in Kinshasa, Congos capital. A fe da s later, I as talking ith him and t o of
his colleagues in the shade of an aircraft hangar in Kinshasa s airport for charter ights, aiting for a
plane to us to the forest.
It as a hot morning. We sat on plastic garden chairs, looking out o er a run a undisturbed b
aircraft. The airport seemed half-ruined. Families ere li ing in one hangar, and laundr hung to dr
o er makeshift shelters. A ender came b ith local ne spapers, hich ere lled ith fears of
rene ed political iolence. European embassies had been sending cautionar te t messages to their
resident nationals.
Hohmann is a lean, serious, blue-e ed man in his mid- fties. He has a reputation for professional
fortitude, but also for chilliness. One bonobo researcher told me that he as er di cult to ork
ith, and there ere harsher judgments, too. He li es in Leip ig ith Barbara Fruth, his ife and
frequent scienti c collaborator, and their three oung children. Three or four times a ear, he ies to
Kinshasa, here he charters a light plane operated b an American-based missionar group. The
plane takes him into the orld s second-largest rain forest, in the Congo Basin, and puts him ithin
hiking distance of a stud site called Lui Kotal, here he has orked since 2002. When Hohmann
rst came to Congo then Zaire he operated from a site that could be reached onl b s eating
upri er for a eek in a motori ed canoe. People think it s entertaining, but it s not, he told me, as
e aited. It s so slo . So hard. He added, You al a s think there s going to be something round
the ne t bend, but there ne er is. He is an orderl man ho has learned ho to ithstand disorder,
an impatient man ho has reached some accommodation ith endless dela .
Hohmann makes onl short isits to Lui Kotal, but the camp is run in his absence b Congolese sta
members on rotation from the nearest illage, and b foreign research students or olunteers. T o
ne camp recruits ere joining Hohmann on this ight: Andre Fo ler, a tough-looking Londoner
in his forties, as an e perienced chimpan ee eld orker ith a Ph.D.; R an Matthe s as a
languid Canadian-American of thirt ho had ans ered an online ad ertisement to be Lui Kotal s
camp manager, for three hundred euros a month. We had all met for the rst time a fe da s earlier,
in a caf in the least la less neighborhood of Kinshasa, here Hohmann had atl noted that, of all
the o erseas isitors he had in ited to Lui Kotal o er the ears, onl one had e er anted to return.
Fo ler and Matthe s ere a bit ar of Hohmann, and so as I. We had e changed small talk o er

a pink tablecloth, establishing, rst, that the British sa bo- h-bo ; Americans, bah -obo ; and
Germans something in bet een.
Fo ler and Matthe s had just taken their last sho er before Christmas. The ould be camping for
at least nine months, detached from their pre ious li es e cept for access, once or t ice a eek, to
brief e-mails. Fo ler, emanating self-reliance, as impatient for the e ile to come; he had brought
little more than a penknife and a cop of The Se en Pillars of Wisdom. Matthe s as carr ing
more. As e disco ered o er time, his equipment included a fur hat, a leather-bound photo album, an
in atable sofa, and goggles decorated ith glitter. Matthe s is a de otee of the annual Burning Man
festi al, in the Ne ada desert, and this, apparentl , had informed his African preparations.
Matthe s ould be keeping accounts and ordering supplies. Fo ler s long-term plan as to nd a
postdoctoral research topic about bonobos, but his dail dut , on this trip, as to be a habituator
someone able to nd the communit of thirt or so bonobos kno n to li e near the camp, and sta
ithin sight of them as the mo ed from place to place, ith the idea that future researchers might be
able to obser e them for more than a fe seconds at a time. Fo ler called it chimp-bothering.
(Watching bonobos, I understood, is not like ornitholog ; there s no pretense that ou re not there.) It
ga e an insight into the pace of bonobo studies to reali e that, nearl e ears after Hohmann rst
reached Lui Kotal, this process of habituation and identi cation upon hich serious research
depends remained un nished.
There s a satisfaction for a scientist to come home at night ith his notebook lled, Hohmann said
ith a shrug. The most happ people are al a s the ecologists. The go to the forest, and the trees
are not running a a . He and his colleagues ere still racing through the dark, tr ing to get I.D.s,
and most of the interesting bonobo questions ere still unans ered. Is male aggression kept in check
b females? Wh do females gi e birth onl e er e to se en ears, despite frequent se ual acti it ?
In the far distance, such lines of inquir ma con erge at an understanding of bonobo e olution,
Hohmann said, and, be ond, the origins of human beings. It s a long path, and, because it s long,
there are fe people ho do it. If it as quicker and easier? There are hundreds of people orking
ith baboons and lemurs, so it s not so eas to nd our niche. A student orking ith bonobos can
close his e es and pick a topic, and it ca be rong.

We nall boarded a tin plane. Our pilot as a middle-aged American ith a straight back and a
large mustache. As e took o , Matthe s as speaking on a cell phone to his mother, in Ne Jerse
enjo ing the nal moments of reception before it as lost for the rest of the ear. The Congo Ri er
as beneath us as e rose through patches of lo clouds. Suddenl , the plane seemed to ll ith
clouds, as if clouds ere made of a dense hite mist that could drift bet een airplane seats. The pilot
turned to look the fog seemed to be coming from the rear of the cabin and then glanced at
Hohmann, hose seat as alongside his. Is that O.K.? the pilot asked, in the most carefree tone
imaginable. Hohmann said it as, e plaining that liquid nitrogen, imported to free e bonobo urine,
must ha e been forced out of its cannister b the change in air pressure. Mean hile, Matthe s told
his mother, The plane seems to be lling ith smoke, at hich point his phone dropped the call.
We e inland, to the east. The Congo Ri er looped a a to the north. Bonobos li e onl south of
the ri er. (Accordingl , the ha e been called left-bank chimps. ) The e olutionar tree looks like
this: if the trunk is the common ape ancestor and the treetop is the present da , then the lo est that
is, the earliest branch leads to the modern orangutan. That ma ha e been about si teen million
ears ago. The ne t-highest branch, around eight million ears ago, leads to the gorilla; then, si
million ears ago, the human branch. The remaining branch di ides once more, perhaps t o million
ears ago. And this last split as presumabl connected to a geographical separation: chimpan ees
e ol ed north of the Congo Ri er, bonobos to the south. Chimpan ees came to inhabit far- ung
landscapes that had arious tree densities; bonobos largel sta ed in thick, gloom forest.
(Chimpan ees had to compete for resources ith gorillas; but bonobos ne er sa another ape one
theor argues that this richer en ironment, b allo ing bonobos to mo e and feed together as a
leisurel group, led to the e olution of reduced rancor.) From the plane, e rst looked do n on a at
landscape of grassland dotted ith patches of trees; this slo l became forest dotted ith grassland
patches; and then all e could see as a crush of trees barel making a for the occasional scribble
of a Congo tributar .
After three hours, e landed at a dirt airstrip in a eld of tall grass and taller termite mounds. There
ere no buildings in sight. We ere just south of the equator, e hundred miles from Kinshasa, and
three hundred miles from the nearest road used b cars in a part of the continent connected b
ater a s or b trails running through the forest from illage to illage, good for pedestrians and the
occasional old bic cle. The plane left, and the airstrips onl infrastructure a sunshade made of a
sheet of blue plastic tied at each corner to a rough ooden post as dismantled in seconds, and
taken a a .
Joseph Etike, a qui ical-looking man in his thirties ho is Hohmanns local manager, organi ed
porters to carr our liquid nitrogen and our in atable sofa. We rst alked for an hour to Lompole, a
illage of thirt houses made of baked-earth bricks and thatched roofs, and stopped at Etike s home.
People ere ama ed hen Gottfried rst came to the illage, and asked about the bonobos, Etike
recalled, standing beside his front door. (He spoke in French, his second language.) The d ne er
heard of such a thing. His salar as re ected in his ardrobe: he as dressed in jeans and sneakers,
hile his neighbors ore ip- ops and battered shorts and Pok mon T-shirts. I asked Etike ho
local people had historicall thought of the bonobo. It depends on the famil , he said. In mine,
there as a stor that m great-great-grandfather became lost in the forest and as found b a
bonobo, and it sho ed him the path. So m famil ne er hunted them. But the tradition as
someho not full impressed on Joseph as a bo , and hen he as se enteen someone ga e him
bonobo meat, to his mother s regret. Ho did it taste? Like antelope, he said. No. Like elephant
meat.
O
ne afternoon in 1928, Harold Coolidge, a Har ard oologist, as picking through a storage
tra of ape bones in a museum near Brussels. He e amined a skull identi ed as belonging to a
ju enile chimpan ee from the Belgian Congo, and as surprised to see that the bones of the skull s
dome ere fused. In a oung chimpan ee (and in a oung human, too), these bones are not joined but
can shift in relation to one another, like broken ice on a pond. He had to be holding an adult head,
but it as not a chimpan ee s. Se eral similar skulls la nearb .
Coolidge kne that this as an important disco er . But he as incautious; hen the museums
director passed b , Coolidge mentioned the skull. The director, in turn, alerted Ernst Sch ar , a
German anatomist ho as alread a are that there ere di erences bet een apes on either side of
the Congo. And, as Coolidge later rote, in a ash Sch ar grabbed a pencil and paper, and
published an article that named a ne subspecies, Pa a a i c , or p gm chimpan ee. This
as the animal that e entuall became kno n as the bonobo. (In fact, bonobos are barel smaller
than chimpan ees, e cept for their heads; but Sch ar had seen onl a head.) I had been

ta onomicall scooped, Coolidge rote. He had the lesser honor of ele ating Pa a ic to the
status of full species, in 1933.
Li e bonobos had alread been seen outside Congo, but the , too, had been misidenti ed as chimps.
At the turn of the centur , the Ant erp oo held at least one. Robert Yerkes, a founder of modern
primatolog , brie o ned a bonobo. In 1923, he bought t o oung apes, and called one Chim and
the other Pan ee. In Almost Human, published t o ears later, he noted that the looked and
beha ed quite di erentl . Pan ee as timid, dumb, and foul-tempered. Her resentment and anger
ere readil aroused and she as quick to gi e them e pression ith hands and teeth, Yerkes rote.
Chim as a jo : equable and eager for ne e periences. Seldom daunted, he treated the m steries of
life as philosophicall as an man. Moreo er, he as a genius. Yerkes s description, coupled ith
later stud of Chims remains, made it plain that he as Pa a i c : bonobos had a good reputation
e en before the had a name. (Pan ee as a chimpan ee; but, in defense of that species, her
pee ishness as probabl connected to a tuberculosis infection.) Chim died in 1924, before his
species as recogni ed.
For decades, p gm chimpan ee remained the common term for these apes, e en after bonobo
as rst proposed, in a 1954 paper b Eduard Trat , an Austrian oologist, and Hein Heck, the
director of the Munich oo. (The suggested, incorrectl , that bonobo as an indigenous ord;
the ma ha e been led astra b Bolobo, a to n on the south bank of the Congo Ri er. In the area
here Hohmann orks, the species is called ed a.) In the thirties, that oo had three members of Pa
a i c , and Heck and Trat had studied them. B the time their paper, the rst based on detailed
obser ations of bonobo beha ior, as published, the specimens ere dead, allegedl killed b stress
during Allied air raids. (The deaths ha e been cited as e idence of a bonobos innate sensiti it ; the
oos brute chimpan ees sur i ed.) As Frans de Waal has noted, Heck and Trat s pioneering insights
the rote that bonobos ere less iolent than chimps, for e ample did not become general
scienti c kno ledge, and had to be redisco ered.
T ent ears passed before an one attempted to stud bonobos in the ild. In 1972, Arthur Horn, a
doctoral candidate in ph sical anthropolog at Yale, as encouraged b his department to tra el alone
to Zaire; on the shore of Lake Tumba, three hundred miles north est of Kinshasa, he embarked on
the rst bonobo eld stud . The idea as to gather all the information about ho bonobos li ed,

hat the did something like Jane Goodall, Horn told me. Goodall as alread famous for her
long-term stud of chimpan ees in Gombe, Tan ania, and for her poise in the lms made about her
b the National Geographic Societ and others. Thanks, in part, to her ork, the chimpan ee had
taken on the role of model species for humans the instructi e nearest neighbor, the best li ing hint
of our past and our potential. (That role had pre iousl been held, at di erent times, b the gorilla
and the sa anna baboon.) At this time, Goodall had con dence that chimpan ees ere b and large,
rather nicer than us.
Horns attempt to follo Goodall s model as th arted. He spent t o ears in Africa, during hich
time he obser ed bonobos for a total of about si hours. And, hen I did see them, as soon as the
sa me the ere gone, he told me.
In 1974, not long after Horn left Africa, Goodall itnessed the start of hat she came to call the
Four-Year War in Gombe. A chimpan ee population split into t o, and, o er time, one group iped
out the other, in gor episodes of territorial attack and cannibalism. Chimp aggression as alread
recogni ed b science, but chimp arfare as not. I struggled to come to terms ith this ne
kno ledge, Goodall later rote. She ould ake in the night, haunted b the memor of itnessing
a female chimpan ee gorging on the esh of an infant, her mouth smeared ith blood like some
grotesque ampire from the legends of childhood.
Reports of this beha ior found a place in a long-running debate about the fundamentals of human
nature a debate, in short, about hether people ere nast or nice. Were humans sa age but for the
constructs of ci il societ (Thomas Hobbes)? Or ere the ci il but for the corruptions of societ
( Jean-Jacques Rousseau)? It had not taken arring chimps to suggest some element of biological
inheritance in human beha ior, including aggression: the case had been made, in its most popular
recent form, b Desmond Morris, in The Naked Ape, his 1967 best-seller. But if chimpan ees had
once pointed the a to ard a tetch but less than menacing common ancestor, the could no longer
do so: Goodall had documented bloodlust in our closest relati e. According to Richard Wrangham, a
primatologist at Har ard and the author, ith Dale Peterson, of Demonic Males (1996), the
Gombe killings made credible the idea that our arring tendencies go back into our prehuman past.
The made us a little less special.

Mean hile, bonobo studies began to gain momentum. Other scientists follo ed Horn into the
Congo Basin, and the set up t o primar eld sites. One, at Lomako, three hundred miles northeast
of Lake Tumba, came to be used b Randall Susman, of Ston Brook Uni ersit , and his students.
Further to the east, Taka oshi Kano, of K oto Uni ersit , in Japan, made a sur e of bonobo habitats
on foot and on bic cle, and in 1974 he set up a site at the edge of a illage called Wamba. Earl data
from Wamba became better kno n than Lomakos: the Japanese spent more time at their site and
sa more bonobos. Susman, ho e er, can take credit for the rst bonobo book: he edited a collection
of papers gi en at the rst bonobo s mposium, in Atlanta, in 1982.
In the inter of 1983-84, in an e ploration that as less gruelling but as in uential as an eld
research, Frans de Waal turned his attention from chimps to bonobos, and spent se eral months
obser ing and ideotaping ten bonobos in the San Diego Zoo. He had recentl published
Chimpan ee Politics: Po er and Se Among Apes (1982), to great acclaim, and, as de Waal
recentl recalled, Most people I talked to at the time ould sa , Wh ould ou do bonobos if ou
can do real, big chimpan ees? Among the papers that dre on his studies in San Diego, one as
particularl noticed in the academ . In Tension Regulation and Nonreproducti e Functions of Se in
Capti e Bonobos, de Waal reported that these apes seemed to be ha ing more se , and more kinds
of se , than as reall necessar . He recorded se enteen brief episodes of oral se and four hundred
and t ent equall brief episodes of face-to-face mounting. He also sa fort -three instances of
kissing, some in ol ing e tensi e tongue-tongue contact.
I
n the late nineteen-eighties, Gottfried Hohmann as an ambitious scientist in his thirties; he
spent nearl three ears in southern India, researching ocal communication in macaques and
langurs. But it as di cult then to get funding for India, Hohmann told me. And the bonobo
thing as just heating up. Frans s paper reall a ected e er one in the scienti c communit .
Tongue-kissing apes? You cant come up ith a better stor . Then people said to me, We ant ou
to go in the eld. Hohmann ran his hand back and forth o er his head. So, he said.
We ere sitting on a ooden bench at the edge of a forest clearing barel larger than a basketball
court, talking against a constant screech an insect tinnitus that the ear ne er quite processed into
silence. Trees rose a hundred feet all around, gi ing the impression that e had fallen to the bottom
of a ell. T o da s after our plane touched do n, e had reached Lui Kotal. In the inter ening
hours, hich ere inarguabl more challenging for the three ne comers than for Hohmann, e had
rst camped in a iolent rainstorm, then follo ed some un agging porters on a trail that led through
the hot, soup air of the forest, and along aist-high streams that o ed o er mud. We had then
camped again, before crossing a fast- o ing ri er in an unstead canoe.
No , at e in the afternoon, the light at Lui Kotal as beginning to fade. People ho ork there
make do ith little sun and ith a hori on that is directl o erhead. Around us, the all of
egetation as solid e cept here broken b paths: one led back to the illage; another led into that
part of the forest here Hohmann and his team ha e permission to roam an area, si miles b e,
hose boundaries are streams and ri ers. In the clearing stood a do en structures ith thatched roofs
and no alls. Some of these sheltered tents; a larger one as a kitchen, here an open re as
burning; and another as built o er a long ooden table, beside hich hung a 2006 Audubon Societ
calendar that had been neatl con erted ith glue, paper, and an e tra agant super uit of time
into a 2007 calendar. At the table sat t o oung American olunteers ho ere not man eeks a a
from seeing the calendar s images repeat. Pale, skinn men in their t enties, earing ild beards,
the looked like the needed rescuing from kidnappers. Three others ere less feral, and had been in
the camp for a shorter time: a oung British oman olunteer, an Austrian oman ho had recentl
graduated from the Uni ersit of Vienna, and a S iss Ph.D. student attached to the Ma Planck
Institute.
Hohmann, shirtless, as in an eas mood, kno ing that much of the logistical and political business
of the trip as no done. Before lea ing the illage, I d seen something of a bonobo researcher s
e tended duties. The men of Lompole had con ened around him, their arms crossed and hands
tucked into their armpits. Hohmann remained seated and silent as an angr debate began as
Hohmann described it, bet een illagers ho ere unhapp about the original deal that compensated
the illage for ha ing to stop hunting around Lui Kotal (this had in ol ed a bulk gift of corrugated
iron, to be used for roofs) and those ho orked directl for the project and sa the greater
ad antage in stabilit and emplo ment. Hohmann had nall got up and deli ered a forceful speech
in Lingala, Congo s national language. He nished ith a moment of theatre: he loomed o er his
main antagonist, agging his nger. It s good to remind him no and then ho short he is,
Hohmann later said, smiling.

B 1989, Hohmann told me, he had read enough bonobo literature to be tempted to isit Zaire. E en
if one left aside French kissing, he said, the bonobo allured me. I thought, Thi is a species. B then,
thanks to eld and capti e studies, a picture of bonobo societ had begun to emerge, and some
peculiar chimpan ee-bonobo dichotomies had been described. Besides looking and sounding
di erent from chimpan ees (bonobos let out high hoops that can seem restrained alongside
chimpan ee elling), bonobos seemed to order their li es ithout the hierarchical fur and iolence of
chimpan ees. ( With bonobos, e er thing is peaceful, Takeshi Furuichi, a Japanese researcher ho
orked ith Kano at Wamba, told me. When I see bonobos, the seem to be enjo ing their li es.
When I see chimpan ees, I am er , er sorr for them, especiall for the high-ranking males. The
reall ha e to pa attention. ) In capti it , at least, male bonobos ne er ganged up on females,
although the re erse sometimes occurred. The bonds among females seemed to be stronger than
among male chimpan ees, and this as perhaps reinforced b se ual acti it , b momentar episodes
of frottage that bonobo e perts refer to as genito-genital rubbing, or g-g rubbing. And, unusuall ,
the females ere said to be se uall recepti e to males e en at times hen there as no chance of
conception.
We said, We ha e to ans er: Wh is it like this? Hohmann said. The males, the ph sicall
superior animals, do not dominate the females, the inferior animals? The males, the geneticall
closel related part of an bonobo group, do not co perate, but the females, ho are not related, do
co perate? It is not onl di erent from chimpan ees but it iolates the rules of social ecolog .
Hohmann e to Zaire and e entuall set up a small camp in Lomako Forest, a fe miles from the
original Ston Brook site. His memor is that Susmans camp had been unused for ears, but Susman
told me that it as still acti e, and that Hohmann as graceless in the a that he took o er the
forest. And although Hohmann said that he orked ith a ne communit of bonobos, Susman said
that Hohmann inherited bonobos that ere alread habituated, and failed to ackno ledge this
research ad antage. Whate er the truth, the distrust seems t pical of the eld. The challenges of
bonobo research call for chimpan ee igor, and this leads to animosities. Susman told me that
Hohmann as the kind of man ho, if he as sitting b the side of the road and needed a lter for
his Land Ro er, people ould dri e right b . E en if the had e e tra lters in the trunk.

When a researcher has access to a species about hich little is kno n, and hose e er gesture seems
to echo a human gesture, and hose e es meet a human ga e, there is a temptation simpl to stare,
until ou ha e seen enough to tell a stor . That is ho Hohmann judged the ork of Dian Fosse ,
ho made long-term obser ations of gorillas in R anda, and the ork of Jane Goodall, at least at the
start of her career. The li ed ith the apes and for the apes, he said. It as Let s see hat I m
going to get. I enjo it an a , so hate er I get is ne. And this is ho Hohmann regarded the
Japanese researchers, for all their perse erance. The Wamba site had produced a lot of data on social
and se ual relations, and Kano published a book about bonobos, hich concluded ith the suggestion
that bonobos illuminated the e olution of human lo e. But hat the Japanese produced as not
reall satisf ing, Hohmann said. It as narrati e and descripti e. The are not setting out ith a
question. The ant to de a d bonobos. Moreo er, the Japanese initiall lured bonobos ith
food, as Goodall had lured chimpan ees. This as more than habituation. At Wamba, bonobos ate
sugarcane at a eld planted for them. The primatological term is pro isioning ; Hohmann calls it
opening a restaurant. (As an e ample of the possibl distorting impact of pro isioning, Hohmann
noted that the Wamba females had far shorter inter als bet een births than those at Lomako.)
Hohmanns rst sta at Lomako lasted thirteen months. Half a through, Barbara Fruth, a German
Ph.D. student, e to join him; the e entuall married. (Up until then, I as not thinking of
ha ing a famil , Hohmann said. I as just doing hat I did. I said, I dont ha e the time, and ho s
cra enough to join me? ) Hohmann and Fruth e back and forth bet een German and
Lomako, and the bonobos e entuall became so habituated that the ould sometimes fall asleep in
front of their obser ers. The Ma Planck Institute is not a uni ersit ; it supports an academic life that
man professors else here ould nd en iable one of long-term funding and no undergraduates.
Hohmann as able to publish slo l . Though not immune to the charms of ape- atching, he as at
pains to set himself precise research goals. Ho did bonobos build nests? Ho did the share food?
As one of his colleagues described it, Hohmann anted to a oid being dirtied b the stain of
primatolog a discipline regarded b some in biolog as being a icted b personalit cults and
o ere trapolation. The big bonobo picture might one da emerge, but it ould happen onl after the
rigorous testing of h potheses in the forest. When a publisher asked Hohmann for a bonobo book, he
responded that it as too soon. Gottfried s one of those people ho dont ant to risk being

critici ed, so the make absolutel certain that the e completel nailed e er thing do n before the
publish, Richard Wrangham told me, ith a mi ture of respect and impatience.
In 1997, not long after the birth of their rst child, Hohmann and Fruth decided to li e in Congo
full time. The leased a house in Basankusu, the nearest to n to Lomako ith an airstrip. Hohmann
had alread picked up the ke s hen ci il ar inter ened. The troops of Laurent Kabila, the rebel
leader and future President, ere at that time making a long tra erse from est to east the
e entuall reached Kinshasa, and President Mobutu Sese Seko ed. One da , hen Hohmann as at
Lomako ithout his ife, soldiers from the go ernment side turned up and ga e him a da to lea e.
The anted to get e er one out of the area ho might help the rebels, Hohmann said. (Around
the same time, the Japanese researchers abandoned Wamba.) Hohmann took onl hat he could
carr . On his a back to Kinshasa, he as interrogated as a suspected sp .
T
he bonobo fell out of the ie of scientists at the er moment that the public disco ered an
interest. In 1991, Na i a Ge g a hic sent Frans Lanting, a Dutch photographer, to
photograph bonobos at Wamba. At the time, there ere no pictures of bonobos in the ild,
Lanting recentl told me. Or, at least, no professional documentation. On his assignment, Lanting
contracted cerebral malaria. But he as stirred b his encounter ith the bonobos. I became sure
that the boundaries bet een apes and humans ere er uid, he said. You cant call them animals.
I prefer creatures. It as haunting, the a the kne as much about ou as ou kne about them.
It became his task, he later told Frans de Waal, to sho ho close e are to bonobos, and the to
us.
Man of his photographs ere se uall e plicit. Na i a Ge g a hic found the pictures of se ualit
hard to bear, Lanting said. That as a place the maga ine as not read to go. The maga ine
printed onl tame images. Not long after, Lanting contacted de Waal, ho had recentl taken up a
post at Emor , as a professor of primate beha ior and a researcher at the Yerkes National Primate
Research Center. Agreeing to collaborate, the approached Ge , the German maga ine. As de Waal
recentl told me, laughing, Naturall , Ge put t o copulating bonobos on the co er. Not long
after ard, Scie i c A e ica printed an illustrated article. In 1997, the Dutchmen brought out a
handsome illustrated book, Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape.

B this time, the e periments of Sue Sa age-Rumbaugh had dra n the public s attention to Kan i, a
bonobo said to be unusuall skilled at communicating ith humans. (Sa age-Rumbaugh s claims for
Kan i ha e been a source of contro ers among linguists.) But de Waal s book established the
reputation of the species in the mass media. Lanting s photographs, since idel republished, sho ed
bonobos lounging at Wamba s sugarcane eld, tr ing oga stretches, and engaging in arious kinds of
se ual contact. A fe pictures sho ed bonobos up on t o feet. (As a caption noted, these upright
bonobos ere handling something edible and out of the ordinar cut sugarcane, for e ample
suggesting a pose dictated b a idit , like a man bent o er a table in a pie-eating contest.) In his te t,
de Waal inter ie ed eld researchers, including Hohmann, and as fastidious at the le el of
historical and scienti c detail. But his rhetoric as richl a ored, and emphasi ed a sharp contrast
bet een bonobos and chimpan ees. The chimpan ee resol es se ual issues ith po er, he rote.
The bonobo resol es po er issues ith se . ( If chimpan ees are from Mars, bonobos must be from
Venus, de Waal rote on a later occasion.) Bonobos ere more elegant than chimpan ees, he said,
and their backs appeared to straighten better than those of chimpan ees: E en chimpan ees ould
ha e to admit that bonobos ha e more st le.
In a recent con ersation, de Waal told me, The bonobo is female-dominated, doesnt ha e arfare,
doesnt ha e hunting. And it has all this se going on, hich is problematic to talk about it s almost
as if people anted to sho e the bonobo under the table. The Forgotten Ape presented itself as a
European tonic to American prudishness and the ested interests of chimpan ee scientists. The
bonobo as gentle, horn , and de Waal did not quite sa it Dutch. Bonobos, he argued, had been
neglected b science because the inspired embarrassment. The ere se , de Waal rote (he often
uses that ord here others might sa se ual ), and the challenged established, blood accounts of
human origins. The bonobo as no less a relati e of humans than the chimpan ee, de Waal noted,
and its beha ior as bound to o erthro established notions about here e came from and hat
our beha ioral potential is.
Though de Waal stopped short of placing bonobos in a state of blissful serenit (he ackno ledged a
degree of bonobo aggression), he certainl left a reader thinking that these animals kne ho to li e.
He rote, Who could ha e imagined a close relati e of ours in hich female alliances intimidate
males, se ual beha ior is as rich as ours, di erent groups do not ght but mingle, mothers take on a
central role, and the greatest intellectual achie ement is not tool use but sensiti it to others?
The appeal of de Waal s ision is ob ious. Where, at the end of the t entieth centur , could an
optimist turn for reassurance about the foundations of human nature? The si ties ere o er. Goodall s
chimpan ees had gone to ar. Scholars such as La rence Keele , the author of War Before
Ci ili ation (1996), ere e ca ating the role of arfare in our prehistoric past. And, as Wrangham
and Peterson noted in Demonic Males, arious nonindustriali ed societies that ere once seen as
intrinsicall peaceful had come to disappoint. Margaret Mead s 1928 account of a South Paci c id ll,
Coming of Age in Samoa, had been largel debunked b Derek Freeman, in 1983. The people
identi ed as the Gentle Tasada the Philippine forest-d ellers made famous, in part, b Charles
Lindbergh had been redra n as a small, odd communit rather than as an isolated ancient tribe
hose mores ere illustrati e. The Harmless People, as Eli abeth Marshall Thomas referred to the
hunter-gatherers she studied in southern Africa, had turned out to ha e a murder rate higher than
an American cit . Although the picture as b no means accepted uni ersall , it had become
possible to see a clear line of thugger from ape ancestr to human prehistor and on to Srebrenica.
But, if de Waal s ndings ere true, there as at least a hint of respite from the idea of ineluctable
human aggression. If chimpan ees are from Hobbes, bonobos must be from Rousseau.
De Waal, ho as described b Ti e earlier this ear as one of the hundred in uential people ho
shape our orld, e ecti el became the champion soft-spoken, bagg -e ed, and mustachioed of
hat he called the hippies of the primate orld, in lectures and inter ie s, and in subsequent
books. In Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist E plains Wh We Are Who We Are (2005),
he rote that bonobos and chimpan ees ere as di erent as night and da . There had been,
perhaps, a acanc for a Jane Goodall gure to represent the bonobo in the broader culture, but
neither Hohmann nor Kano had occupied it; Hohmann as too dour, and Kano as not uent in
English. Besides, the bonobo as be ond the reach of all but the most determined and best- nanced
tele ision cre . After 1997, that Goodall role at least, in a reduced form fell to de Waal, though
his research as limited to bonobos in capti it . At the time of the book s publication, de Waal told
me, he could sense that not e er one in the orld of bonobo research as thrilled for him, e en
though I think I did a lot of good for their ork. I respect the eld orkers for hat the do, but
the re not the best communicators. He laughed. Someone had to do it. I ha e cordial relationships
ith almost all of them, but there ere some hard feelings. It as Wh is he doing this and h am
I doing this?

De Waal ent on, People ha e taken o ith the ord bonobo, and that s ne ith me although
he ackno ledged that the identi cation has sometimes been e cessi e. Those ho learn about
bonobos fall too much in lo e, like in the ga or feminist communit . All of a sudden, here e ha e a
politicall correct primate, at hich point I ha e to get into the opposite role, and calm them do n:
bonobos are not a a nice to each other.
A
t the Lui Kotal camp, hich Hohmann started e ears after being e pelled from Lomako,
the people ho ere not tracking apes spent the morning under the Audubon calendar, as the
temperature and the humidit rose. R an Matthe s put out solar panels, to charge a car batter
po ering a laptop that dispatched e-mail through an uncertain satellite connection. Or, in a storage
hut, he arranged precious cans of sardines into a supermarket p ramid. We sometimes heard the
snee elike call of a black mangabe monke . For lunch, e ate cassa a in its local form, a long, cold,
gra tube of boiled dough a single gnocco gro n to the si e of a dachshund. A radio brought ne s
of gun re and rocket attacks in Kinshasa: Jean-Pierre Bemba, the defeated opposition candidate in
last ear s Presidential elections, had ignored a deadline to disarm his militia, and hundreds had been
killed in street ghting. The airport that e had used had been attacked. The Congolese camp
members including, at an time, t o bonobo eld orkers, a cook, an assistant cook, and a
sherman, orking on commission ere largel pro-Bemba, or, at least, anti-go ernment, a ie
e pressed at times as nostalgia for the rule of Mobutu Sese Seko. Once, the sang a celebrator
Mobutu song that the had learned as schoolchildren.
It as so eas for Frans to charm e er one, Hohmann said of de Waal one afternoon. He had the
big stories. We dont ha e the big stories. Often, e ha e to sa , No, bonobos can be terribl boring.
Watch a bonobo and there are da s hen ou dont see an thing just sleeping and eating and
defecating. There s no se , there s no food-sharing. During our rst da s in camp, the bonobos had
been elusi e. Right no , bonobos are not ocali ing, Hohmann said. The re just there. And if ou
go to a oo, if ou gi e them some food, there s a fren . It s so di erent.
Capti it can ha e a striking impact on animal beha ior. As Craig Stanford, a primatologist at the
Uni ersit of Southern California, recentl put it, Stuck together, bored out of their minds hat is
there to do e cept eat and ha e se ? De Waal has argued that, e en if capti e bonobo beha ior is
some hat ske ed, it can still be usefull contrasted ith the beha ior of capti e chimpan ees; he has
e en ritten that onl capti e studies control for en ironmental conditions and thereb pro ide
conclusi e data on interspeci c di erences. Stanford s repl is that di erent animals respond er
di erentl to capti it .
In the ild, bonobos li e in communities of a fe do en. The mo e around in smaller groups during
the da , in the pattern of a bus-tour group let loose at a tourist attraction, then gather together each
night, to build ne treetop nests of bent and half-broken branches. But the sta in the same
neighborhood for a lifetime. When Hohmann found bonobos on his rst isit to Lui Kotal, he could
be con dent that he ould nd the same animals in subsequent ears. On this trip, the bonobos had
been seen, but the ere keeping to the er farthest end of Hohmanns t ent -thousand-acre slice of
forest: a t o-hour alk a a . ( The are just so beautiful, Andre Fo ler, the British habituator,
said, after seeing them for the rst time. I cant put it an other a . ) There as talk of setting up a
satellite camp at that end a couple of tents in a small clearing but eighing against the plan as
the apparentl serious risk of attack b elephants. (Forest elephants headed an impressi e lineup of
local terrors, abo e leopards, falling trees, dri er ants, and the green mambas that ere sometimes
seen on forest paths.) So the e isting arrangement continued: t o or three people ould go into the
forest and hope to follo bonobos to their nest site at night; the follo ing da , t o or three others
ould reach that same point before da n.
When I ent out one morning ith Hohmann and Martin Surbeck, the S iss Ph.D. student, the
hike began at a quarter to four, and there ere stars in the sk . We alked on a spring path la ers
of deca ing lea es on sand. I ore a head torch that lit up thick, attic-like dust and, at one moment, a
bat that e into m face. We stepped o er fallen tree trunks in arious states of deca , hich
sprouted di erent kinds of fungus; after an hour or so, e reached one on hich local poachers had
car ed a gra ti message. Poachers, hose smoked-bonobo carcasses can fetch e dollars each in
Kinshasas markets, ha e often been seen in the forest, and their gun re often heard. Their li elihood
as disrupted last ear hen Jonas Eriksson, a S edish researcher on a isit to Lui Kotal, burned
do n their forest encampment. I as later gi en a translation of the gra ti: :
.
Hohmann stopped alking at half past e, at a point he kne to be ithin a fe hundred feet of
here the bonobos had nested. Bonobos sleep on their backs ma be holding to a branch ith just

one foot, and the rest of the bod looking er rela ed, Hohmann had said, adding that nest-
building is the onl thing that sets great apes aside from all other primates. (He speculates that the
-rich sleep that nests allo ma ha e contributed to the e olution of big brains.) We ould hear
the bonobos hen the oke. When e turned o our ashlights, there as a hint of light in the sk ,
enough to illuminate Surbeck using garden clippers to cut a branch from a tree and snip it into a Y
shape about four feet long; he tied a black plastic bag across the forked end, to create a tool that
hinted at a lacrosse stick but as designed to catch bonobo urine as it dripped from treetops.
Surbeck s dissertation as on male beha ior: he ould measure testosterone le els in the urine of
arious bonobos, in the hope that po er structures not easil detected b obser ation ould re eal
themsel es. (If an e identl high-ranking male had relati el lo testosterone, for e ample, that
might sa something about the po er he as dra ing from his mother. A male bonobo t picall has
a lifelong alliance ith its mother.)
There as a rustle of lea es in the high branches, like a do ndraft of ind. To alk to ard the
sound, e had to lea e the trail, and Surbeck cut a path though the undergro th, again using
clippers, hich allo ed for progress that as quieter, if less cinematic, than a s inging machete. We
stopped after a fe minutes. I looked up ard through binoculars and, not long after ard, remo ed
the lens caps. The half-light reduced the forest to blacks and dark greens, but a hundred feet up I
could see a bonobo sitting silentl in the fork of a branch. Its black fur had an acr lic sheen. It as
eating the tree s small, hard fruit; as it che ed, it let the casing of each fruit fall from the corner of its
mouth. The debris from this and other bonobos dropped onto dead lea es on the forest oor, making
the sound of a rain sho er just getting under a .
In the same tree, a skinn bonobo infant alked a fe feet from its mother, then returned and
clambered, riggling, into the mother s arms and then did the same thing again. And there ere
glimpses, through branches, of other unhurried bonobos, as the scratched a knee, or glanced do n at
us, unimpressed, or stretched themsel es out like artists models. Hohmann had plucked a large,
rattling leaf from a forest- oor shrub that forms a ke part of the bonobo diet, and he began to shred
it slo l , as if eating it: bonobo researchers aim to present themsel es as animals nonchalantl feeding
rather than creepil stalking. He and Surbeck made solemn, urgent notes in their aterproof
notebooks, and hispered to one another. The ere b no a are of some t ent bonobos abo e
us, and could identif man b name (Olga, Paulo, Camillo). A fact not emphasi ed in ildlife lms
is that ape identi cation is frequentl done b oomed-in inspection of genitals. A lot of the
con ersation at Lui Kotal s dinner table dealt ith scrotal shading or the shape of a female bonobo s
pink se ual s elling. ( This one is like che ing gum spit out, Caroline Deimel, the Austrian, once
said of a female.)
At about si -thirt , the bonobos started mo ing do n the trees not ith monke abandon but
branch b branch, ith a nal thud as the dropped onto the forest oor. Then the alked a a , on
all fours, looking far tougher and more lean and muscular than an oo bonobo. An infant la
spread-eagled on the back of its mother, in a posture that the scienti c literature s eetl describes as
jocke st le. (A bonobo s arms are shorter than a chimpan ee s, and its back is hori ontal hen it
alks. A chimpan ee slopes to the rear.) As the last of the bonobos strolled o , e lost sight of them:
the undergro th stopped our ie at a fe feet. We alked in the direction the seemed to ha e
gone, and hoped to hear a call, or the sound of mo ing branches. Hohmann told me that bonobos
sometimes ga e a a their position b atulence. The forest as b no hot, and looked like a
displa captioned in a natural-histor museum: plants pulled at our clothes, trees crumbled
to dust, and the ground ga e a to mud.
We heard a sudden high screech ahead Whah, hah and then sa , coming back in our
direction, a reddish blur immediatel follo ed b black. We heard the gallop of hands and feet on the
ground, and a squeal. Hohmann told me in a hisper that e had seen a rare thing a bonobo in
pursuit of a duiker, a tin antelope. We ere er close to seeing hunting, he said. Ver close. The
bonobo had lost the race, Hohmann said, but if it had laid a hand on the duiker in its rst lunge the
results ould ha e been blood . Hohmann has itnessed a number of kills, and the dismembering,
nearl al a s b females, that follo s. Bonobos start ith the abdomen; the eat the intestines rst,
in a process that can lea e a duiker ali e for a long hile after it has been captured.
F
or a purportedl peaceful animal, a bonobo can be surprisingl intemperate. Jeroen Ste ens is a
oung Belgian biologist ho has spent thousands of hours stud ing capti e bonobos in
European oos. I met him last ear at the Planckendael Zoo, near Ant erp. I once sa e female
bonobos attack a male in Apenheul, in Holland, he said. The ere gna ing on his toes. I d alread
seen bonobos ith digits missing, but I d thought the ould ha e been bitten o like a dog ould

bite. But the reall che . There as esh bet een their teeth. No , that s something to counter the
idea of Ste ens used a high, mocking oice Oh, I m a bonobo, and I lo e e e e.
Ste ens ent on to recall a bonobo in the Stuttgart Zoo hose penis had been bitten o b a female.
(He might also ha e mentioned keepers at the Columbus and San Diego oos ho both lost bits of
ngers. In the latter instance, the local paper s generous headline as
. ) Zoos dont kno hat to do, Ste ens said. The , too, belie e that bonobos are less
aggressi e than chimps, hich is h oos ant to ha e them. But, as soon as ou ha e a group of
bonobos, after a hile ou ha e this reall iolent aggression. I think if oos had bonobos in big
enough groups more like ild bonobos ou ould e en see them killing. In Ste ens s opinion,
bonobos are er tense. People usuall sa the re rela ed. I nd the opposite. Chimps are more laid-
back. But, if I sa I like chimps more than I like bonobos, m colleagues think I m cra .
At Lui Kotal, not long after e had follo ed the bonobos for half a da , and seen a duiker run for its
life, Hohmann recalled hat he described as a murder stor . A fe ears ago, he said, he as
atching a oung female bonobo sitting on a branch ith its bab . A male, perhaps the father of the
bab , jumped onto the branch, in apparent pro ocation. The female lunged at the male, hich fell to
the ground. Other females jumped do n onto the male, in a scene of fren ied iolence. It ent on
for thirt minutes, Hohmann said. It as terribl scar . We didnt kno hat as going to happen.
Shrieking all the time. Just bonobos on the ground. After thirt minutes, the all ent back up into
the tree. It as hard to recogni e them, their hair all on end and their faces changed. The ere reall
di erent. Hohmann said that he had looked closel at the scene of the attack, here the egetation
had been torn and attened. We sa fur, but no skin, and no blood. And he as gone. During the
follo ing ear, Hohmann and his colleagues tried to nd the male, but it as not seen again.
Although Hohmann has ne er published an account of the episode, for lack of an thing but
circumstantial e idence, his ie is that the male bonobo su ered fatal injuries.
On another occasion, Hohmann thinks that he came close to seeing infanticide, hich is also
generall ruled to be be ond the bonobos beha ioral repertoire. A ne born as taken from its
mother b another female; Hohmann sa the mother a da later. This female as carr ing its bab
again, but the bab as dead. No it becomes a criminal stor , Hohmann said, in a mock-legal
tone. What could ha e happened? This is all e ha e, the facts. M stor is the unkno n female

carried the bab but didnt feed it and it died. Hohmann has made onl an oblique reference to this
incident in print.
These tales of iolence do not recast the bonobo as a brute. (Nor does ne e idence, from Lui Kotal,
that bonobos hunt and eat other primates.) But such accounts can be placed alongside other
challenges to claims of sharp di erences bet een bonobos and chimpan ees. For e ample, a stud
published in 2001 in the A e ica J a fP i a g asked, Are Bonobos Reall More Bipedal
Than Chimpan ees? The ans er as no.
The bonobo of the modern popular imagination has something of the qualit of a pre-scienti c great
ape, from the era before li e specimens ere idel kno n in Europe. An Englishman of the earl
eighteenth centur ould ha e had no argument ith the thought of an upright ape, passing silent
judgment on mankind, and dri en b an uncontrolled libido. But during m con ersation ith Jeroen
Ste ens, in Belgium, he glanced into the oo enclosure, here a number of heft bonobos ere
daubing e crement on the alls, and said, These bonobos are from Mars. There are man da s hen
there is no se . We re running out of adolescents. (As de Waal noted, the oldest bonobo in his San
Diego stud as about fourteen, hich is oung adulthood; all but one episode of oral se there
in ol ed ju eniles; these bonobos also accounted for almost all of the kissing.)
Craig Stanford, in a 1997 stud that questioned arious alleged bonobo-chimpan ee dichotomies,
rote, Female bonobos do not mate more frequentl or signi cantl less c clicall than
chimpan ees. He also reported that male chimpan ees in the ild actuall copulated more often
than male bonobos. De Waal is unimpressed b Stanford s anal sis. He counted onl heterose ual
se , he told me. But if ou include all the homose ual se then it s actuall quite di erent. When I
asked Hohmann about the bonobo se at Lui Kotal, he said, It s nothing that reall strikes me.
Certainl , he and his team obser e female g-g rubbing, hich is not seen in chimpan ees, and
needs to be e plained. But does it ha e an thing to do ith se ? Hohmann asked. Probabl not.
Of course, the use the genitals, but is it erotic beha ior or a greeting gesture that is completel
detached from se ual beha ior?
A hug? A hug can be highl se ual or t o leaders meeting at the airport. It s a gesture, nothing else.
It depends on the conte t.

At Lui Kotal, the question of dominance as also less certain than one might think. When I d spoken
to de Waal, he had said, unequi ocall , that bonobo societies ere dominated b females. But, in
Hohmanns cautious mind, the question is still undecided. Data from ild bonobos are still slight,
and science still needs to e plain the ph sical superiorit of males: h ould e olution lea e that
e tra bulk in place, if no use as made of it? Female spotted h enas dominate male h enas, but the
ha e the muscle to go ith the life st le (and, for good measure, penises). Wh hasnt this le elled
out in bonobos? Hohmann asked. Perhaps sometimes it i important for the males to be stronger.
We ha ent seen accounts of bonobos and leopards. We dont kno hat protecti e role males can
pla . Perhaps, Hohmann ent on, males e ercise po er in a s e cannot see: Do the males step
back and sa to the females, I m not competing ith ou, ou go ahead and eat ? The term male
deference has been used to describe some monke beha ior. De Waal sco s: Ma be the bonobo
males are chi alrous We all had a big chuckle about that.
Hohmann mentioned a recent e periment that he had done in the Frankfurt oo. A colon of
bonobos as put on a reduced-calorie diet, for the purpose of measuring hormones in their urine at
di erent moments in their fast. It as not a beha ioral e periment, but it as hard not to notice the
actions of one meek male. This is a male that in the past has been badl mutilated b the females,
Hohmann said. The bit o ngers and toes, and he reall had a hard life. This male had al a s
been shut out at feeding time. No , as his diet continued, he disco ered aggression. For the rst
time, he pushed a a some lo -ranking females, Hohmann said. He successfull fought for food.
He became bold and demanding. A single hungr animal is not a scienti c sample, but the episode
sho ed that this male s subser ience as, if not e actl a personal choice, one of at least t o
beha ioral options.
The media still regularl ask Frans de Waal about bonobos; and he still uses the species as a stick to
beat hat he scorns as eneer theor the thought that human moralit is no more than a eneer of
restraint laid o er a icious, animal core. Some of his colleagues in primatolog admit to impatience
ith his position and ith the broader bonobo cult that attens a comple animal into a caricature
of Edenic good humor. Frans has got all the best intentions, in all sorts of a s, but there is this
sense in hich this polari ing of chimps and bonobos can be taken too far, Richard Wrangham said.
Hohmann concurred: There are certainl some points here e are in agreement; and there are
other points here I sa , No, Frans, ou should go to Lomako or Lui Kotal, and atch bonobos, and
then oud kno better. He ent on, Frans enjo ed the lu ur of being able to sa eld ork is
senseless. When ou see ild bonobos, some things that he has emphasi ed and stretched are much
more modest; the se stu , for e ample. But other things are e en more spectacular. He hasnt seen
meat-sharing, he has ne er seen hunting.
I think Frans had free rein to sa an thing he anted about bonobos for about ten ears, Stanford
told me. He s a great scientist, but because he s orked onl in capti e settings this gi es ou a
blindered ie of primates. I think he took a simplistic approach, and, because he published er
idel on it and rites er nice popular books, it s become the con entional isdom. We had this
large bod of e idence on chimps, then suddenl there ere these other animals that ere er
chimplike ph sicall but seemed to be er di erent beha iorall . Instead of sa ing, These are
ariations on a theme, it became point-counterpoint. He added, Scienti c ideas e ist in a
marketplace, just as e er other product does.
A
t the long table in the center of the camp, I sho ed Hohmann the Sa e the Hippie Chimps
er from the Manhattan bene t. He as listening on headphones to Mo art s Requiem; he
glanced at the card, and put it to one side. Then, despite himself, he laughed and picked it up again,
taking o the headphones. Well, he said.
We ere at Lui Kotal for three eeks. If ou sta here, the hours become da s, become months,
Martin Surbeck said. It all melts. We had t o isitors: a Congolese o cial ho, joined b a guard
carr ing an AK-47, alked from a to n t ent - e miles a a to cast an e e o er the camp and
accept a cash consideration. He sta ed for t ent -four hours; e er hour, his digital rist atch spoke
the time, in French, in a omans oice I e de he e .
I sa the bonobos onl one other time. I as in the forest ith Brigham Whitman, one of the t o
bearded Americans, hen e heard a burst of screeching. In a hisper, Whitman pointed out Dante,
a senior male, sitting on a lo branch. He s one of the usual suspects, Whitman said. Balls hanging
out, that s his pose. Whitman ran through Dante s distinguishing characteristics: He s er old
perhaps thirt and missing most of his right inde nger. His lips are cracked and his face is
eathered, but his e es are ibrant. He has large hite nipples. His toes are e tremel fat and huge,

and his bell hair is redder. He as the oldest male. Dante just gets his spot and he doesnt mo e.
He just sits and eats.
We follo ed Dante and a do en others throughout the afternoon. The climbed do n from trees,
alked, and climbed back up. Small, non-stinging bees congregated in the space bet een our e eballs
and the lenses of our binoculars. In the late afternoon, Dante and others climbed the highest trees I
had seen in the forest. It as almost dark at the forest oor, but the sun caught the tops of the trees,
and Dante, a hundred and ft feet up, ga ed est, his hair looking as if he d just taken o Darth
Vader s helmet, his e pression gra e.
I
n the lobb of the Grand Hotel in Kinshasa, the Easter displa as a collection of da ed li e
rabbits and chicks corralled b a lo hite icker fence. At an outdoor bar, the cit s diplomatic
classes ga e each other long-lasting handshakes hile their children raced around a deep, square
s imming pool. I sat ith Gottfried Hohmann; e had hiked out of Lui Kotal together the da
before. As e left the half-light of the forest to reach the rst golden patch of sa anna, and the rst
open sk , it had been hard not to feel e olutionar stirrings, to feel oneself speeding through an
Ascent of Man illustration, knuckles lifting from the ground.
B the pool, Hohmann talked about a Ba arian childhood collecting li ards and reading Konrad
Loren . He as glad to be going home. He has none of the fondness for Congo that he once had for
India. Still, he ill keep returning until retirement. He said that in German , hen he eats dinner
ith friends ho ork on faster-breeding, more con enientl placed animals, I think, Oh, the li e
in a di erent orld People sa , You re i . . . ? I sa , Yes. Still. This big picture of the bonobo is a
pu le, ith a fe pieces lled, and these big hite patches. This is still something that attracts me.
This piece ts, this doesnt t, turning things around, tr ing to close things.
Because of Hohmanns disdain for premature theories, and his data-collecting earnestness, it had
sometimes been possible to forget that he is still dri ing to ard an e entual glimpse of the big picture
and that this picture includes human beings. Humans, chimpan ees, and bonobos share a common
ancestor. Was this creature bonobo-like, as Hohmann suspects? Did the ancestral forest en ironment
select for male docilit , and did H and the chimpan ee then both dump that beha ior,
independentl , as the e ol ed in less bountiful en ironments? The modern bonobo holds the ans er,

Hohmann said; in time, its beha ior ill start to illuminate such characteristics as relationships
bet een men and omen, the purpose of aggression, and the costs and bene ts of male bonding.
At Lui Kotal, there ere no rocks in the sand earth, and the smallest pebble on a ri erbed had the
allure of precious metal. It is not a place for fossil hunters; the biological past is re ealed onl in the
present. What makes humans and nonhuman primates di erent? Hohmann said. To nail this
do n, ou ha e to kno ho these nonhuman primates beha e. We ha e to measure hat e can see
toda . We can use this as a reference for the time that has passed. There ill be no other a to do
this. And this is hat puts urgenc into it: because there is no doubt that, in a hundred ears, there
ont be great apes in the ild. It ould be blind to look a a from that. In a hundred ears, the
forest ill be gone. We ha e to do it no . This forest is the er , er last stronghold. This is all e
ha e. ♦
P b i hed i he i edi i f he J 30, 2007, i e.
Ia Pa ke ha bee a a i e a The Ne Y ke i ce 2000.
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2/9/22, 3:03 PM S inge The Ne Yo ke

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