[Some bonobos are challenging the notion that humans are the only
primates capable of group-to-group alliances. ]
[[link removed]]

SUNDAY SCIENCE: SCIENTISTS FIND FIRST EVIDENCE THAT GROUPS OF APES
COOPERATE  
[[link removed]]


 

Carl Zimmer
November 16, 2023
New York Times
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Some bonobos are challenging the notion that humans are the only
primates capable of group-to-group alliances. _

A female adult bonobo groomed an adolescent male from a neighboring
group in the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve in the Democratic Republic of
Congo., Martin Surbeck/Kokolopori Bonobo Research Project

 

If a troop of baboons encounters another troop on the savanna, they
may keep a respectful distance or they may get into a fight. But human
groups often do something else: They cooperate
[[link removed]].

Tribes of hunter-gatherers regularly come together for communal hunts
or to form large-scale alliances. Villages and towns give rise to
nations. Networks of trade span the planet.

Human cooperation is so striking that anthropologists have long
considered it a hallmark of our species. They have speculated that it
emerged thanks to the evolution of our powerful brains, which enable
us to use language, establish cultural traditions and perform other
complex behaviors.

But a new study [[link removed]],
published in Science on Thursday, throws that uniqueness into doubt.
It turns out that two groups of apes in Africa have regularly mingled
and cooperated with each other for years.

“To have extended, friendly, cooperative relationships between
members of other groups who have no kinship ties is really quite
extraordinary,” said Joan Silk, a primatologist at Arizona State
University who was not involved in the study.

The new research comes from long-term observations of bonobos, an ape
species that lives in the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
A century ago, primatologists thought bonobos were a slender
subspecies of chimpanzee. But the two species are genetically distinct
and behave in some remarkably different ways.

Among chimpanzees, males hold a dominant place in society. They can be
extremely violent, even killing babies. In bonobo groups, however,
females dominate, and males have never been observed
[[link removed]] to commit
infanticide. Bonobos often defuse conflict with sex, a strategy that
primatologists have not observed among chimpanzees.

Scientists made most of their early observations of bonobos in zoos.
But in recent years they’ve conducted long-term studies of the apes
in the wild.

Martin Surbeck, a behavioral ecologist at Harvard, in 2016 set up a
new observational site in the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve in the
Democratic Republic of Congo. Working with the Mongandu people who
live in neighboring villages, he set out on hikes through the forests
in search of bonobos.

On their first scouting trip, Dr. Surbeck was shocked to see what
happened when the bonobo group they were following encountered another
one. After some excited hooting, the apes settled down into a friendly
gathering.

A peaceful encounter among bonobo groups in the Kokolopori Bonobo
Reserve. Liran Samuni/Kokolopori Bonobo Research Project

The encounter couldn’t have been more different than what happens
between chimpanzee groups. Male chimpanzees typically patrol the
boundaries of their ranges, ready to battle males from other groups.
They will even climb hilltops to scan the horizon for other groups.

“I just felt very privileged to witness this encounter,” Dr.
Surbeck recalled.

After that, Dr. Surbeck and his colleagues came to know the two groups
of bonobos very well. They called one group, with 11 adults,
Ekalakala. The other group, with 20 adults, came to be known as
Kokoalongo.

He and his colleagues observed 95 encounters between the two groups
over the course of two years. Some lasted less than an hour, but
others lasted days. Once, the Ekalakala and Kokoalongo groups lingered
for two weeks before parting ways.

During these mixers, the bonobos behaved much as they would in a
single group. They groomed one another, shared food and cooperated to
chase away snakes.

Yet the two groups remained distinct. The scientists found no evidence
of any offspring from Ekalakala and Kokoalongo apes. The two groups
even maintained their own cultures. Although their ranges overlapped,
they hunted for different kinds of game. Ekalakala bonobos went after
small deer-like mammals called duikers. Kokoalongo bonobos caught
squirrels.

Liran Samuni, an expert on chimpanzees at the German Primate Center in
Göttingen who joined the Kokolopori research, said that the
cooperation between the groups was not just the result of bonobos
being friendly in general. “It’s not just random,” she said.

Dr. Samuni and her colleagues found that individual apes from the
different groups gradually formed bonds as they offered favors and
gifts back and forth. In some cases, two apes from the different
groups even formed an alliance to harass a third bonobo.

Dr. Silk hoped that the new research would encourage similar studies
elsewhere to see just how widespread this cooperation really is among
bonobos. “You always want to see things happening over and over in
different populations before you’re really convinced of how
important this feature is,” she said.

Those observations may not come any time soon. It’s hard to
establish bonobo research sites, and not only because the apes live
deep in rainforests. Scientists also have to contend with
the internal conflicts
[[link removed]] in
the Democratic Republic of Congo. And bonobos, which may number only
15,000 individuals, are threatened by logging and poaching.

Dr. Samuni noted that chimpanzees, with their hostile encounters, are
just as closely related to us as bonobos are. Our species resembles
both lineages, in different respects. While human groups can cooperate
in remarkable ways, they can also organize themselves to fight.

“I wouldn’t say it’s either-or,” Dr. Samuni said. “They are
jointly teaching us about our past.”

_CARL ZIMMER [[link removed]] covers news
about science for The Times and writes the Origins column
[[link removed]]._

_Subscribe to the NEW YORK TIMES
[[link removed]]_

__

CRYPTOGRAPHERS SOLVE DECADES-OLD PRIVACY PROBLEM
[[link removed]]
Three researchers have found a long-sought way to pull information
from large databases secretly, moving us closer to fully private
internet searches.
Madison Goldberg
Quanta Magazine
November 6, 2023

* Science
[[link removed]]
* Primatology
[[link removed]]
* bonobos
[[link removed]]
* cooperation
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]