Bonobos, starring in and as themselves

Perhaps it's time to understand chimps and bonobos not as some kind of less-than-human animals that hold clues to the homo sapiens' past, but in themselves, with all their complexity

A research paper in Current Biology adds to the vast body of work around bonobos that shows they defy the simplistic frameworks that people have tried to cage them in.

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2 min readNov 14, 2026 07:00 AM IST First published on: Nov 14, 2026 at 07:00 AM IST

Of the three most intelligent great apes, the one that revels in its own brilliance is quite obsessed with the other two. Perhaps language and the capacity for higher-order thinking are to blame. They have made human beings narrative-making creatures, and the lives of others are treated as mere metaphors to understand Homo sapiens’ own past and present. Take the poor bonobo. Since it was classified as a species separate from the chimpanzee in 1933, it has borne the burden of proving that human beings aren’t all that bad.

A research paper in Current Biology adds to the vast body of work around bonobos that shows they defy the simplistic frameworks that people have tried to cage them in. In the first years after they were studied, bonobos were dubbed the “loving ape” because they chose to resolve conflicts through grooming, compromise and dialogue in matriarchal social groups. They were also considered to have a more vegetarian diet. They were contrasted with chimps, seen as the more aggressive and might-is-right species, and were used to say that humans, too, perhaps, have less aggressive origins. The latest research now shows that bonobos do hunt quite a bit, and are led more often by females. Already, this is being cited as an argument against “man as hunter” theories about prehistoric humans.

Perhaps it’s time to understand chimps and bonobos not as some kind of less-than-human animals that hold clues to Homo sapiens’ past, but in themselves, with all their complexity. Or, à la Planet of the Apes, tell their stories about us. A bonobo may just think that the human is a creature hell-bent on its own destruction, even as it has greater comforts. And all its culture is just the fiddle Nero played while Rome burned.