(Image: Vanessa Woods)
In the 1920s Robert Yerkes acquired an unusual ape that he named Prince Chim. Chim was more intelligent, fun-loving, cooperative, emotionally positive and full of life than his chimpanzee companion, Panzee. Chim's vocal behaviour was so prolific and reminiscent of language that Yerkes transcribed it using musical notation. Yerkes had discovered the bonobo.
In the 80s and 90s researchers conducted a study comparing a chimp and a bonobo. The aim was to determine if Yerkes's observations were accurate and if either animal, or both, could learn a human language through cultural immersion rather than instruction. The answer for both apes was yes.
Vanessa Woods writes engagingly of her husband, primatologist Brian Hare, struggling to tackle these questions again. Seemingly ignorant of the earlier work, in 2005 Hare embarked on a mission to find out what differentiates bonobos from chimps. With the Democratic Republic of Congo still mired in the aftermath of war, he travelled to the Lola Ya sanctuary in Kinshasa to study bonobos.
Hare found that bonobos do all kinds of things that chimps are not reported to do: they experience constant genital arousal, become attached to individual humans, think up new ways to engage in sexual, altruistic or cooperative behaviour on an essentially non-stop basis, and they die of broken hearts. In short they are a lot like people, even uncomfortably so - a fact that, ironically, has caused many scientists to ignore them.
At the sanctuary, local women are hired to raise baby bonobos during the day. As Hare replicated Yerkes's experiments to test bonobos' ability to cooperate, the women were unimpressed. At times they were the only ones who could get the bonobos - who were busy cooperating with each other - to cooperate with the researchers.
The bonobos insisted on establishing a rapport with the experimenter before every trial. As Woods explains, this often involved some form genital touching - a "bonobo handshake" as she calls it. The researchers failed nearly every test of bonobo socio-sexual etiquette. Worse, they failed to grasp the reality of their own situation: that they are dealing with cultural, not genetic, variables.
In Hare's mind, if a bonobo does something, it must be genetically motivated. He did not see how the force of culture shapes both behaviour and biology across generations. Culture has been confused with genes because behavioural studies are short-term, while culture operates on the scale of generations with a kind of tyranny and force that has not been widely recognised.
Readers can be grateful that a journalist, not bound by unspoken conventions regarding what scientists must never say about non-human primates, married a primatologist. Hare may be the scientist, but Woods conveys the real significance of bonobo culture. She thinks that bonobos have a secret: they can tell us how to avoid war.
The question of whether humans are genetically more like chimpanzees or bonobos pops up throughout the book, but as the book also makes clear, whatever the genetic similarities, bonobo culture is not human culture, and nor is chimpanzee culture human culture. Humans are doomed to war, genocide, environmental degradation and eventually self-destruction only if we fail to grasp the processes of culture and continue to take a short-sighted view of what it can mean to be bonobo, chimpanzee or human.
To read Woods's elegant and entertaining book is to share the experience of a soul realising there is something more - something mankind must learn. In that self-realisation is the secret of the bonobos.
Bonobo Handshake: A memoir of love and adventure in the Congo by Vanessa Woods
Published by Gotham