These Apes Are Matriarchal, but It Doesn’t Mean They’re Peaceful

Male domination is the natural order of things, some people say. But bonobos, primates with whom we share almost 99 percent of our DNA, supply to differ.

Bonobos are great apes that live in societies dominated by women, a relative rarity among mammals, especially in species where males are the largest sex. While women are smaller than their male counterparts, supreme reign in Bonobo societies.

Scientists have long wondered how female bonobos maintain their matriarchs. In a study, published Thorsday in the Journal Communications Biology, the researchers who tracked six Bonobo communities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in almost 30 years proved the first explanation based on evidence on how the female management and support of bonobos. They found that women form coalitions against men to bow the balance of power in their favor.

When a Macho Bonobo leaves the line, nearby women will join to attack or intimidate it. The males that coherent to such conflicts lose social rank, while their female adverse wins it, providing better access to food and the companions of their children.

Bonobos and chimpanzees are our closest living relatives. However, they were one thing to be a slightly narrower and more dark chimpanzee subspecies, but scientists determined almost a century ago that are separate species. These apes in danger of extinction, found only in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, are difficult to study in nature.

To carry out this study, Martin Surbeck, a behavioral ecologist from Harvard University, and other scientists spent thousands of hours, threshing through dense jungles.

“You get around three in the morning, then you walk for one or two hours to find the place where they build their nests the night before,” said Dr. Surbeck. “And then you follow the group throughout the day until they do their nests again.”

It is known among primatologists that bonobos make a lot of love in addition to war. They perform quite heavy caresses, make sex toys and participate in gay relationships. With their sexual activity and lower levels of violence compared to chimpanzees, the idea that bonobos are the hippies of the monkeys world is widespread.

However, the observations of Dr. Surbeck and his team, and those of other researchers, challenge the harmonious stereotypes of these primates. “Bonobos are not as peaceful as people might think,” said Maud Mouginot, an anthropologist at Boston University who did not participate in the current study.

That includes conflict between the sexes. From 1993 to 2021, the researchers observed 1,786 cases of a beef to male with a woman. Examples included Aggesififilos towards a woman or her baby, or monopolizing food. In approximately 61 percent of these fights, the woman associated with other women and was victorious.

Such conflicts “can be very severe,” said Dr. Surbeck. “On some occasions, we suspect that man died as a result of the attack.”

It is known that men lose fingers of hands and feet in such conflicts. In an unfortunate incident, a male bonobo in the Stuttgart zoo in Germany, his penis had in half a battle with two women. A surgeon could sew it again.

Based on all the data they collected, Dr. Surbeck and his team tested several hypotheses about how women maintain power in Bonobo society. After Crunching The Numbers, The Only One The Team Found Evidence To Support Was One Researchers Call The “Female Coalition Hypothesis,” Which suggests that femals work together to overpower evils dining conflicts, resulting in Higher for the Winning for the Winning for The Winning for The Winning for The Winning for The Winning for The Winning for Winning for The Winning for The Winning for The Winning for The Winning for The Winning for The Winning for The Winning for The Winning for The Winning for The Winning for The Winning for The Winning for the winner. They found that the average female bonobo exceeds approximately 70 percent of men in their community.

Dr. Mouginot said what Dr. Surbeck and her colleagues found affirming what scientists like her have suspended for decades about the source of female power in Bonobo society.

“For people who have legs in the field with bonobos, it is not so surprising, but it is really pleasant to have real quantitative data from different bonobos communities,” he said.

Scientists just start scratching the surface when it comes to which lessons can be extracted from the bonobos, said Dr. Surbeck, so it is important to protect them.

“Bonobos are an endangered species,” he said. “Like our closest living relative, they help us look at us. If we lose them, we lose a mirror for humanity.”

But for him, the study also supports the idea that male domain is not a biological inevitability.

“While some people may think that patriarchy and masculine domain are somehow an evolutionary feature in our species, that really is not the case,” Dr. Go. Surbeck said.