Delousing and fruit sharing, how bonobos make friends outside their community

2023-11-16 21:00:00

Thanks to gigantic field work, primatologists have studied the social behaviors of these great apes, which are less aggressive than their chimpanzee “cousins”.

Thousands of hours of observation, in the heart of the immense tropical forest of the Congo Basin, bring us a little closer to bonobos: like humans, these primates are capable of forming bonds of cooperation and sharing with individuals. other communities. The results of the study published this Thursday in the journal Science are doubly extraordinary. Researchers from Harvard University (United States) and the German Primate Center have deployed extraordinary means to study the social interactions of our closest cousins ​​(Pan paniscus) in their natural environment. The assistants responsible for collecting the data spent 702 days in two years in the forest, silently noting the actions of around thirty adults from two bonobo communities.

Thanks to this gigantic monitoring work, primatologists show that “the ability to maintain peaceful relations within one’s group, while deploying acts of sociability without reciprocity…

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