Bonobos, unlike chimpanzees, aren’t usually violent towards other groups
Sergey Uryadnikov/Alamy
A recent study suggests that the last common ancestor of humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos wasn’t particularly prone to violence. The study attempts to reconstruct the evolution of war-like behavior among apes and proposes that the hostility between groups of this ancestor may have been tempered by the bonds between unrelated females. However, the researchers caution that these conclusions are highly speculative.
The debate on whether violence is an integral part of human nature has been ongoing for centuries. Biologists have looked at chimpanzees, which, along with bonobos, are our closest relatives, in an attempt to find answers…
Article amended on 3 July 2023
We corrected the wording of Michael Wilson’s quote.
